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Coder on the Cross
Salon has a nice story of start-up greed and stupidity. It's not the first, and it's not the last, but it's good reading, in a schadenfreude sense. :)
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It's a total crapshoot.
Once I got to go to a faraway land, work on strange and interesting projects and kill deadlines, helping to score a $15M contract right out from under the nose of a competitor. I was one of 5 Golden Boys and we did nothing but eat sleep and drink code for almost 3 months straight. I got paid well and got a vacation out of it at their expense in the end.
Most recently, I went back in the barrel for two months, coded my ass off, gave the demo of my life and practically brought tears to the eyes of the CEO. She still canned the lot of us 2 minutes later, citing problems with their "burn rate".
What did I learn?
It's a total ride and a total crapshoot. When you win, you win big, when you don't you tend to create new and interesting geographical features known as "impact craters".
Also, just my personal experience, you tend to win more often when the project's scope is more than just "owning the space" or "conquering the market segment" and not just in a karmic,spiritual sense either.
Why sign up for a 3-5 year gig when your owners(and I do mean owners) have a 3-month (1 Quarter) attention span?
I don't buy this at all. A lion is not evil when it kills an antelope; that just the way it is. The lion is simply living according to its nature, which might be bad news for the antelopes, but moral good and evil don't even come into the picture.
In fact, the lion is living exactly as it is supposed to. If anything, that is the definition of good, from its own perspective (apologies for the anthropomorphication, but good/evil is a human concept).
Now you say that for man to live according to his nature - i.e. self-interest as motivator - is evil. But I ask you, how can it be evil? If this is how we are, how do we gain by denying it? You don't see lions trying to grow crops, do you? And you don't see lions forging weapons to fight hunters on their own term either.
I will leave you with some Nietzsche:
"Think again before postulating the drive to self preservation as the cardinal drive in an organic being. A living thing desires above all to vent its strength - life as such is will to power - self preservation is only one of the indirect and most frequent consequences of it".
What is so difficult about the software industry that it eats up people like this?
:-)
Good question. It's not the industry, as such, that's eating people, far as I can tell - it's this sort of universal "corporate disease" that hits technology companies, or at least the tech divisions of companies, hardest. But why THIS sector of the economy? Why THESE companies?
Maybe it's the "gold rush" mentality. I mean, people don't get burned out doing architecture, or doing graphic design (usually), maybe that's because in those industries, you have to BE one before you get put in a position to manage. In high-churn sectors, like the dotcom craze at its peak, you get a lot of nontechies owning companies and putting other nontechies in positions of power. Managers who don't understand what's really involved with a ship date, or who don't understand the mental stresses of keeping huge blobs of code straight in one's head for days on end. Leadership who thinks "if I don't understand it, it must be simple." And for that matter, leadership with dollar sign eyeballs, who simply don't care about anything except profit and don't even notice the burned-out empty husks of programmers sitting around the computer room. On the other side, programming isn't like manual labor, where your body wears out before your brain; most people don't understand mental stress and what it does, and thus will continue to put in 70 and 80 hour weeks, not making the connection between that and the routine fainting spells.
Or maybe, this crap happens in EVERY industry, we just don't hear about it.
~ radiographite: art by john shepard
The idea of working illness-provoking hours to demonstrate your loyalty to the company is slowly becoming passe as small, high tech firms are dying.
All of the people who decided to sacrifice their social lives, their families and their health for some nebulous pot of gold at the end of the dot-com rainbow are now realizing what people like my dad (at age 70) learned a few decades back: There's more to life than making a bucket load of cash.
While money is a great tool that lets you do the things that you want to do, work can also be a horrible way to keep you from enjoying the parts of life that make existence worthwhile.
It seems to me that the moral of the story is that working a brutal schedule and producing a lot of product isn't always the winning combination for a successful life. I guess my dad wasn't such a dummy after all.
BTW, I've figured out my own secret of success. I'm an engineer at a big electronics company. I work 40 hours a week. And that's it. And I go home, forget about work, mow my lawn, go for a walk, watch the sunset and enjoy my life. And still make enough money to do everything that I want to do.
-h-
. It is OK to love your spouse, OK to love your kids, yet, for those with neither, it should be OK to love you job equally
But can your job love you back?
That may, in the end, be the moral that we all need to learn...
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Recursive: Adj. See Recursive.
nobody owes you nothing!
working too hard means one thing: you let yourself get worked to death.
it means precisely "dick" to the planet.
get up and dust yourself off and maybe don't make the same mistake next time
What makes people tick? (in the sense of why choose a particular course of action). If we take a leaf out of the spy business, money is actually one of the least effective motivators. GNU appeals to ideology of "free software" whereas ESR notes the power of the ego in scratching an itch. Example of conviction motivated work (citatioation anyone?) was hersay about someone who released some gee-whiz tools (implmeneted nearly single-handedly) just for genomic analysis purely because he didn't want the for-profit group to do it first and fence off that intellectual common. Looking at this example shows the destructive tendences of choosing a task for the wrong reason (stock options + geek-lek comparison with superstar programmer).
... whether stock options, coolness factor, kudos or just appeal to ego, increasing use of these psychological tricks is likely to be an indicator of dysfunctional companies. One prof once said that the difference between normal engineering and software engineering is that you can look at a bridge design and say you can't build it in 90 days with 6 people but customers expect otherwise with software (even though the complexity may be equivalent).
One thing you have to admire about Bill Gates is his ability to motivate a bunch of geeks. Yes, it is possible to produce a bunker mentality (cough*North Korea*cough) and studies have shown that you can accomplish superhuman feats. However, our psychology is not designed to be running in war-zone 24 hours a day. There are reasons why troops are rotated out. The problem is that complex software often requires really convoluted linkages and the optimal unit for holding it is one brain. However smart you are, you have a finit working memory unless you encode stuff at higher abstractions (one of the tricks mathsmatics train you). This leads to dimishing returns in that to progress software (shorter release cycles) more work can only be accomplished by concentrating the thinking into a smaller group of people which naturally leads to burn-out. So managers have to continually come up with tricks or one-upmanship to motivatae the microserfs to stay committed
So given the horror stories and even web-sites describing the non-living (former employeees of Intetel, Amazon, Microserf, etc), why do people continue to act this way? Why become an economic slave for an absentee landlord (Wall Street sentiment)? How many talents will leave the industry because their bodies can't handle the stress? What is so difficult about the software industry that it eats up people like this?
LL
Listen, you may abhor unions but it's a necessary evil and the alternative is much, much worse: unchecked capitalism. History shows us most of the inhumane ills: women and children working 70 and 80 hour weeks and worse. Like it or not, without unions the common worker has NO power in the present system at all. In a world that runs on money, only the corporations have the power to lobby, bribe, give campaign contributions, etc to politicial candidates. Only the threat of socialism (which incidentally didn't arise out of a vacuum, but was a reaction to the worst excesses of capitalism of the late 1800s and early 1900s) and repeated striking and unionization among the people have the autocrats of the United States decide to give SOME assurances to the workers: 8 hour days, safety regulations, etc. And we see them trying to slickly circumvent those all the time, don't we?
It's unfortunate that people like you who only care for their own upward progress in the present system forget the past so quickly and have no sympathy for the people who live in the world with them. After all, it's just evolution right? Get rid of the stupid, the lazy, the ugly, the outcast. What right do they have to a decent living? None, if they're in your path up the corporate ladder and a six-figure salary. The sad thing is people like you are rewarded, climbing that ladder, firmly grinding your heel on the fingers of those below you because you are firmly convinced they don't climb fast enough, though perhaps they just chose to enjoy the scenery, actually have a social life, a significant other, or a family.
And, by the way, for every person that has been "rewarded for being excellent in their jobs", there is another one who has been taken advantage of just like the one in the article. Yes, he could have voted with his feet, but they had tied him to his cubicle with bonds stronger than any chains: the American Dream*.
* Incidentally, the American Dream is largely a myth. History has shown that at least 90 percent of the obscenely rich have risen from the upper middle-class or upper class. The remaining 10- percent is paraded out and overdramatized in hollywood, as a lure to keep the rest of the people working hard.
Find and share links to celebrity profiles on MySpace! http://www.myspacecelebrities.com
Looks like things were good from the word go!
Drag n' Drop DVD Recommendations
When in high school, I did the same kind of thing. At 15, I was expected to maintain an ISP, repair and build PCs, teach classes (even a week-long computer camp), and maintain our network.
We were an Internet cafe, web portal, ISP, and computer store--and why not? Every one of those was making money back then.
Quickly enough, the CEO found it quite easy to just fire everybody but me and have me do everything. Don't read that sentence as hyperbole--I'm being quite literal. Eventually, I worked there, his wife was the secretary, and a middle-aged guy took on web design without being paid for 4 months (then, not at all).
I had EXCELLENT job security. The small town afforded no one who could replace me, and I was not about to go home without my paycheck. The CEO kept me paid, and I got bonuses if I seemed disillusioned (yes, I know that's poor business practice). When I was promised a Christmas bonus, I got it in writing. And I got it (a $1500 bonus is really nice when you're in high school). But nobody else was being paid.
Remember what I said about being a web portal? Imagine eFront, but more ghetto. We had tons of regional offices, who paid an absurd fee to be able to sell advertising space in a region of our web site (divided by state, county, and city). Eventually, as the CEO guzzled away the finances of the company and my moral side got the best of me, I did the only thing I could do:
I destroyed the company.
At that point, I'd get $50/hour when I came in on off-hours, and $20+ at normal times. But it felt like hush money, and as the regional license money was pissed away and not invested into the company, I knew we were going down the toilet, and I wasn't about to go with them. Of course, the FBI snooping around town helped me decide, as well.
I warned the regionals. Without me, the server would soon go down--it could maintain itself, to a degree, but if you have ever managed a 8 GB+ web site that's using FrontPage extensions to an extreme (yes, NT, sorry), you will know how unstable it can get. They prepared to wrest the company from my boss.
At that same time, he was preparing to leave town. He didn't want to go to jail, so he fled to California. The server was co-located, and I remotely managed it. My assistant, who was hired on later, also managed the checking account for our office location.
My paycheck was coming due, and the account had $600. I was owed $2000, and my co-worker was owed $800. We called to find out how we were getting paid, and we got the runaround. My co-worker liquidified the bank account, and kept it all (which I agreed to--since I had no expenses, I thought he might want to actually pay his bills and live). I moved all the office equipment into the back of my truck, and we sent out our resignations.
The company decided it was in their best interest to provide me with the hardware as payment, and then the CEO gave a horrid speech about how terrible employees we were to all the offices. They already knew the true situation, and have now taken the company from the CEO (in prison, I've heard).
The company never made it big, but I think that prevented them from dying in the dot-com crash. One of the regional offices appears to manage everything now, and they're doing a decent job, and offered to re-hire me, but I like college better.
However, from the experience, I learned a few things:
If you're being screwed, you should leave.
If you're watching someone be screwed, you should leave.
If you're screwing someone, then you're the CEO.
-k.
(sorry for the scattered nature of the post, I'm sleepy).
Life is a long, hard road, and many lessons are learned on the way (My grandfather told me this....). In his terminology, this story would be described as school fees. School fees are the price you pay for an education.
The education in this context, is not that it is bad or wrong to sell yourself or your sould to your job, the real lesson is that you should be more careful about who you sell your life to. There are jobs which are worth giving up your life for. Speak to Nuns. Speak to pop-stars.
Still, the lesson is that you need just reward, or the consequences are school-fees.
It is a great thing to see a person who is sold out to a good cause. It is OK to love your spouse, OK to love your kids, yet, for those with neither, it should be OK to love you job equally.
.. if only.
I am currently under the employ of a Silicon Valley startup. I was allured by the prospect of becoming rich from the stock options. While I did receive a 16% raise in pay, I moved 2800 miles from home to come to this new position as an 'IT Manager'.
.com deaths... It's not all that bad, but I would have been better off leveraging my offer with a counter offer with my former employer.
So, with my new salary in hand I go off to the land of the high-tech, the SI Valley, the birthing place for the greats. Yeah, the land of high rents, outrageous gas prices, ludicrous state taxes and the best weather this earth has ever seen.
I arrive at the startup to find this mongoloid 'IT Manager'. My dreams of truly attaining a higher rank are smashed in a single moment. I have to get into a dick waving contest with a valley kid who covets Microsoft. We were officially deemed both IT Managers. I knew I just had to wait this loser out.
Finally, the hard rain falls and economics kicks in. Valley boy gets the boot and I get to pick up all the slack. Under-funding is abound. The two fools before me squandered $750,000 and I have no budget. The end result is a lot of time spent on AIM, email and Slashdot. Hopefully, I'll be moved from the IT group to something more intelligent, I can only hold my breath.
So here I am, smack in the middle of Silicon Valley during job-nuclear-winter. I'm afraid to get too cocky to be fired because jobs aren't growing on trees. So I keep coming back for budget-less existence. The one thing that stands out the most - the job I left which was paying rather well was sending me to school/training/etc. I received several certifications under their employ. Now I will get nothing, unless it is done under my own volition.
Here I am with my worthless stock, high rent and outrageous taxes from the foul state of California (good weather though). It's not all that bad, its really a long, almost paid vacation without any schooling.
All in all the company is interesting, I have the possibility of expanding my horizons with some new things to administer, and luckily this startup has weathered the storm of
Don't fall into the trap, and make sure a bonus, schooling/education/training is in the contract!
There is no free lunch.
Legalize the constitution. Think for yourself question authority.
Schadenfreude doesn't translate well directly into English. Better to give a description of what it is. You know that kind of good (albeit selfish) feeling you get when you see bad things happen to other people (probably deservedly so)? That's schadenfreude.