First Internship was a startup Dude knew nothing of programming and simply wanted me to make him a whole social media app with an integrated marketplace and AR functionality. That was fun.
I meannnnnnnn..... If you really really really really really wanted to. You could have definitely pulled it off. If you started programming out the womb and understood every single language no problem. By then you should be able to make more than doctors do in my opinion. Opportunities are endless
I can totally relate to this: Incompetent bosses - check Boss hires Incompetent buddies and family members - check Hemorrhaging money left and right and blitz fires 80 percent of staff - check Tech company with no technology - check
@@abdirahmann all you need are the right mixture of buzzwords and a half-believeable idea and the silicon valley investors will pour funding over your head.
Diversity Hiring makes me cringe so much. I was in a meet with an artist that would work with me (technically under me but I don't care about such distinctions) and she had an amazing portfolio, seemed very competent and friendly, was vibing well with us on the call, perfect schedule despite being on another country - her hiring was all but guaranteed, but our boss just had to throw the "And of course it's important to have more women for diversity of...." line at the end. Followed by some 5 seconds of awkward silence as everyone wondered how to respond to that besides nodding and letting it go. It wasn't anything major, and we never talked about that since, but I wonder if that put her head in the wrong place, like thinking she was hired because she's a woman rather than an amazing artist with a good workflow.
I’m a former freelance linguistic consultant getting into tech and, being a black woman, it makes the already present imposter syndrome sooo much worse. Even when you’re confident in your own abilities, you always have that doubt in the back of your mind: did I get hired because they genuinely liked me, or just because I ticked off the boxes on their dumb quota? Not only do you have to deal with those thoughts internally, but also because it makes it harder to prove your place at a school or company as an individual, and not some political bargaining piece. If anything, being born in the 90s, I’ve had to deal with that far more than the “micro aggressions” these people would rather obsess over.
This is exactly the wrong thing to say or to evaluate someone on. Either they can do the job or they can’t. Hiring someone partly, or just because that person is some demographic to help with diversity target tends to poison the well. Should you happen to hire someone who really is a good fit, talented, and happens to be part of a favored demographic group for the current trend of diversity hiring, have the dignity and good taste and sense NOT to say a damn thing about diversity hiring. That person is valuable to the business because of what they contribute not because of whatever demographic group they belong to.
I avoid submitting to calls for artists if they make a big deal about diversity, I'm not good with the feeling of being selected due to anything other than my portfolio. My body of work is mainly figurative so I recently received an exhibition invite for a show centered around that sort of art, the summary stressed submitting works depicting "nonbinary bodies, especially." Incidentally, I have SWYER syndrome -- I had a hearty chuckle then promptly deleted it. (Intersex people can have long arms or no body hair, but come ON, way to make me feel like an alien lmfao.)
1. Unpaid overtime is an unspoken requirement. 2. Training is non-existent - you learn on the job or die. 3. Getting work emails & texts outside of work hours creeps up on you. 4. They promise you perks when they hire you, & you'll never get them. 5. Having to pay for things yourself, because they're cheapskates. 6. Every problem is placed on a scapegoat employee(s), despite a lack of processes/resources.
Number 3 is only an issue for ignorant folk, you have to be paid to be on call to actually be on call. If a boss wants to fire you for not answering messages that you are not obligated to answer, then you probably shouldn't be working at that company. Unpaid overtime is also legally dubious, hence why it's so hard to actually get overtime in most companies. I know it's a bit different with software development but still, there are labor laws.
@@awesomeferret If someone is salaried, they don't have to be payed overtime. Now granted, the salary has to meet a minimum amount before the government considers it acceptable to not pay overtime, but even so...
Lol. I got a 1000 share stock option at $7.50/share when I was hired (I tried for 3 weeks vacation instead but they wouldn't do that). 6 months later of thoroughly busting ass, having no life between 12-14 hour workdays if not all-nighters, driving to our remote data-center 1-2 times per week (40k miles on my car in a year - figure that out for added "hours") I got another 1000 share option at ~$3 current price... By the time I left a year later I could've exercised my first option and paid $7500 to buy $1200 worth of stock (was at $1.20 by then). 6 months after I left the VC was gone, the company was bought out and the stock was worthless (was getting delisted at like 12¢). I said I'd give it a year, and I did. I had no life... 45m drive in, 12-14 in the office, 45m home, pretty much all I did that year was wake up, shower, drive to work, drive home, eat, fall asleep - repeat. We tried to get them to let us work from home a day or two a week, they refused until about a month before I left. I was like a zombie - going back to a bigger company mostly 40hr week job was like a vacation, I took at 10% pay cut even and still felt I came out ahead.
same with clients, i deal with it people from other companies a lot and every time a send an explanation via email and they want me to call them i assume right away that they are idiots. usually i am right.
Unfortunately this aversion to putting things in writing is NOT restricted to startups, even in small subcontractors that develop products for the aerospace and defense industry where you'd expect every little thing to have written down documentation has this problem!
Best and hardest jobs to get imo are mid-sized companies that have been around since the Cretaceous era. Their margins are so well maintained it’s frightening, plus they generally pay well (just don’t expect a promotion).
dang I think you're right.. I never thought about how tight my company's margin probably is.. I am in the position you are describing. Cant complain though, I'd recommend working for a place like this to anyone. A small company who have been around for a long time, and probably have a lot of things figured out. It's past the major growing pains of a startup, but it isnt a giant corporation. Like you said, I don't expect a raise, but it's mutual. They are well aware that I will likely only stay for 2 or 3 years, at which point I've grown a ton, and they can replace me with the next person. I got lucky by getting hired as a junior dev and they took me in and my boss trained with me for weeks. I learned more in those few weeks than any bootcamp I ever attended. My experience gained from that will pay dividends, and I feel like that is a fair payoff for no raises. Tech companies more or less expect people in tech to hop around a bit more. It's common in the industry
literally FromSoftware btw (creator of the souls series and got GOTY with their game sekiro), I've seen their job requirements for lead programmers and there are some things VERY speciflc and complex, but as they say in their site, the juniors can get personal help from their seniors with topics they're not familiarized with, and even have a sort of library in the company to help them. And we're talking about a company that makes games since the 90's, and only started to get successful in 2009 with demon souls.
I'm not a programmer, I'm IT, but this is true in my experience. I've had the best job at a non-tech company that has literally been around since the gold rush
The best job I've ever had (and still have) is for a mutual insurance company founded in 1908. The IT department, where I work, is from 1956 when the company brought their first tube based room sized computer. They've got their shit together. Everything is super well documented, there are reliable processes and routins for doing almost anything, people are super nice, the workload and your manager's expectations of you are within bounds, but you still get challenging tasks to keep growing as a person and to keep the job interesting. Now I see what my father meant when he told me as a kid that working for an big old company with a good pedigree is the best.
Becoming friends with the accountant is a good tip. It saved me from a startup about to fall, I arranged for them to fire me before the CEO realized it was going to happen. Had to pay me 3 months for the firing.
Most founders don’t really understand how morale works. Paul Graham from YC wrote in 2007 that if the morale of your employees are not derived by validation of your customers/ users.... your startup WILL die. If the morale of your startup is mainly derived by google level type perks .... your company is a walking zombie. Being in a startup can be very demoralizing ... Just know that the lows in a startup are extremely low and the highs are extremely high. Also most founders think they can keep everything in the financials a secret until the very last minute... If your runway is one year out and you haven’t secured any funding for the following year or quarter following the end of the runway.....ALWAYS COMMUNICATE your runway with your employees and investors! They need to know because they ALSO have skin in the game. Please steer clear of companies with “sensitive” founders or companies that push “progressive” ideals for the sake of being “progressive.” This is very conducive to a toxic environment that will eventually shape the culture of the company in the long run.... if the company can still run.
@@spol do you really only want equity from a startup as a form of payment? 90% of them fail. I need cashflow to pay my bills not equity. Most don't offer equity anymore, they just want you to do 50 jobs at once and pay you very little. If you can find a good and proper startup, then it's not so bad. Gotta find the good ones.
Hey, I worked at this company! Ping pong table, cool, fun atmosphere. Great events. And the CEO would frequently call the senior developers and make them work on random ideas he had at 1 AM. Also we kept building and rebuilding the same product that gained no traction with users for years on end. Then "randomly" 1/3 of the company (including me) got laid off and the company slogged along for 5 more months. As for diversity, I noticed that companies want to hire diverse, but they are totally unwilling to hire junior developers. Because the industry has been white and asian for so long, a lot of the black, hispanic, etc people working were junior developers. How are non-white non-asian groups of people supposed to grow in the industry if nobody wants to hire junior developers?! It's absurd. It's ok to hire people with less experience and train them up.
Don't know how accurate is the racial angle where you are, but in my country in Europe, which is ethnically very homogenous, the very same aversion to hire junior developers can be seen. There is no racial angle here as far as I can tell, yet junior developers will have a very hard time, especially if they are self taught.
I'm a recruiter for a tech company and i can confirm that its really hard to convince our manager to take on junior even if they had a super good interview and had great social skill / coachable people. So yeah i can confirm in my case it has nothing to do with ethnicity
@@gabrielhuet9370 you miss the original point. I think what's it's trying to get at is that if companies were actually serious about diversity pipelines, they'd be more flexible on years of experience and hire more juniors
@@duhduhduhdiesel1436 ahh I understand what you mean, as there are more juniors that apply that are from different ethnic background? I dont keep a register of all the people i interview or screen but it would be a good exercice too see the pourcentage if that was possible!
I have worked at a few tech startups and I agree that they are full of soul-less dead-eyed day-walkers. One tip I can give people is to always be on-guard whenever you get randomly pulled into a meeting with HR when you know you've done nothing to warrant anything like that. A company I worked at did this to me 6 months in, despite the fact I was one of the top engineers there in terms of money we were bringing in from projects. Watch out for the dreaded PIP, or Performance Improvement Plan. If you ever get ambushed by your managers & HR into a meeting where they try to gaslight you by telling you they aren't happy with your performance, but want to work with you to get better and just need you to sign this PIP to agree to it, don't do it. Never sign the PIP, even if you have been fucking off, because you're literally signing something that says you agree that you haven't been doing your job, which they will turn around and use as an excuse to fire you 30 days later with zero severance. The company I worked at 10ish year ago did this to ~100 of 250 people a month before they got bought out. After the merger, they laid off 150 people, including myself. However, I knew something was fishy in the meeting with HR and refused to sign the PIP, despite the fact they threatened to fire me right there if I didn't. I called their bluff and refused, the meeting eventually ending, and I didn't hear a word about any of the alleged complaints about my performance again. What I found out later was that they did this to a shitload of people, and those that signed it still got laid off after the merger, with only 2 weeks severance pay. I didn't sign shit, and I got 6 months. It pays to not take shit from HR. Anyway, never sign a PIP, always stick up for yourself, and never ever trust HR or be friendly with them cus they will always just abuse that relationship to fuck you in the end. If you do go to work for a startup, do it with the expectation that it's only a short-term arrangement and take as much as you can get while you are there. Get as many skills, contacts, and performance bonuses as you can, and try to peace out and trade up for a better job 12-16 months later before they get the chance to lay you off, or worse, promote you. Get in, take what you can, and get out.
A friend of mine was tricked into signing a temporary relocation contract to move to a 300% times more expensive place with just a 50% salary increase. Since it was that or be fired, she accepted because it was just 4 months. 2 months in, she started spending her own savings to continue working for that company so she resigned. Startups usually only care about their own interests nothing else.
A startup symptom from my experience: Hiring inexperienced people because they're cheap. This is how I got my first job in the industry. I knew nothing and they took me pretty much because another guy working there was at my uni and because I had made a few crappy wordpress sites before. I certainly got way more from that job than I was able to reciprocate. That company went under when covid started, but they gave me the boost I needed to be where I am now, having doubled my salary since last year and actually providing my money's worth. I was not the only one they picked up like this.
ahh poor bastards. Well I'm glad you managed to get ahead dude, just don't be shy to extend a hand down to others when you get even further ahead yourself.
The people running the company might be cheap and inexperienced themselves. Which goes back to startup incubators being started by rich successful people and not taken too seriously.
You just think they hired you because you were cheap but inexperienced, in reality they hired you because the things they wanted you to do they knew they could at worst, help you handle it. It isn't rocket science. A proper senior can quickly make even a modest intern code professional grade code with relatively minimal training. It's only new stuff that can trip up an intern/junior.
That nepotism line really hit... I worked a couple weeks for my uncle's startup and quickly realized I was underqualified. I spent workdays in the office LEARNING programming. I felt like I was wasting their resources, so I quit.
From an employer's perspective, the "nepotism" part is partly due to reducing the financial risk of hiring someone they know over complete strangers. The HR department does take quite a bit resources from the employer. So the executives have a decision to make: hire a person full of merit, but personality and future prospects are completely unknown, or a reliable referral that can hopefully fit well within the job description? Net results for this kind of hiring: Pro: A family-oriented organization culture, less attrition Con: GOSSIPVILLE, a person with best connections get promoted
My first job after college was at a startup. They were all smiles, promised me everything and even went so far as to claim they were planning to move to a particular city I mentioned wanting to live (i later found out that this hadn’t been discussed at any point with other staff, even senior ones who co-founded the company). The following 2 months were filled with poor communication, lack of focus, gaslighting, exceptionally high expectations and essentially zero guidance. When they finally terminated me I was destroyed and completely blamed myself, but over time I’ve come to realize what a toxic experience that entire thing was. Unless I know the guy or gal running it, I’m gonna be distancing my career from any and all startups
I got a job at a biotech startup that fits your description perfectly. It was a jungle of red flags, so I quit after a month. I'm about to start a new job at another startup but this time I know the guys running it and they are cool, otherwise I would stay as far as I can from a startup.
My experience was similar - false claims on their website, borderline lying to their investors. Put all their pressure on me to produce results so that they could live up to their false claims and become millionaires. At 8 months, HR, aka the ceo's wife, threatens to fire me despite me getting no negative feedback prior to a still mostly positive performance review at 7 months. HR and my manager then proceeded to try and gaslight me into thinking I was crazy for wishing I had gotten any negative feedback from my manager for the first 7 months if he was so unsatisfied with my work. Then got fired at the 10 month mark. Currently looking for jobs but concerned about what they would say about me to future employers
Worked for a "SaaS" startup that was just reselling manipulated data on fancy charts. They had 12 beer taps and a 60 foot wall screen. 70 layoffs right before Christmas, I was laid off despite being in the top 3 for sales while the friends of the founder still work there. Never again. Also had some very shady accounting practices, recognizing future revenue as already paid
Easy to say from your armchair. Making companies is super hard. Mistakes are bound to happen. But if your management can't take feedback get the hell out of there.
It's why those companies tend to fail. But even if they are doing everything right but take on some huge project without a clue..on how to do it and end up in deep trouble with millions already spent. Like what happens in kickstarters.
Another reason I think projects like this tend to fail is because people who start one are a lot of times young people who, first, don't have enough experience in managing businesses, and second, don't have a rich family or enough money themselves to waste on the first years.
My advice for tech start-ups want more diversity: Don't ask people for their favourite meme on the application form. Don't show off photos of the team eating pizza with some guy dressed as Batman/Deadpool because you think it's showing everyone what a quirky and chill employee you are. Don't say things like "if you consider yourself nerdy then we want to hear from you!" You can't do that then get surprised when everyone is a white male Redditor.
@@astrotecn nothing wrong, just not diverse. The joke is: "startups want to be diverse but unwittingly put in place selection bias in their application forms. haha stupid startup"
I could write a book on the startup I worked for. It didn't do much of the crazy spending, but the aspect of it where it was all run by family members was where things got seriously squirrelly. You had one family member stealing from the company while people were getting wrongfully blamed and fired for it, another couple of them attempted a hostile takeover of the company, another was having an affair in the office (literally). At the same time, finances were so tight we in the manufacturing division were tearing up paper towels sheets into 16+ tiny pieces to clean equipment but then the company would throw these lavish luncheons for sales staff that cost more than they were paying me in 6 months. Another executive got so angry at me, once, over something super petty and unimportant (they had temper issues), that I was pulled back into the warehouse and chewed out by this exec while they clenched their fists and huffed like a raging bull. It was bizarre.
Not a "startup", but a friend of mine told me that he was working as a chef at the restaurant run by a bored housewife of a wealthy businessman decided that she is "free and independent" -- with the husband's money, ofc. And instead of buying a proper kitchen equipment, she decided to buy a chandelier for a couple of millions despite him explaining how important kitchen eq is. The food ended up being uncooked or cold, because the equipment was that awful -- but there was that chandelier... Which is completely tasteless.
Come on if you were a wife of a wealthy businessman are you saying you won’t buy chandelier for your new restaurant. You might as well not call it a restaurant without a chandelier. 😂
I worked at a startup that had a 8000 € coffee machine :') and the thing always blocked and created a goddamn mess. They also had a stocked bar with wine racks and (broken) designer chairs. Place sank after 4 or 5 years.
I had a boss who hired 2 people who he thought were so crappy, they could never leave. Turns out they both tried to get him fired and destroyed the entire division to the point it was outsourced.
Startups are good for a lot of people for one simple reason: The barrier to entry is extremely low. Most people are shit at programming even people that graduated fancy CS degrees, bootcamps etc. A lot of people can't fake it well enough to just jump into one of the big companies but a startup is so much easier to get into. The people doing the interviews at a startup are usually faking it too. Work a few years at a bunch of startups and get good on their time and money. Get your wank work done and spend the rest of the time consuming as much stuff you're interested in as possible, get your name on some opensource projects etc... then when you're into your 30s get out the resume, add all of that startup cool tech buzzword bingo crap onto to it and get yourself and nice easy experienced level job at a bigger more stable corporation.
4 ปีที่แล้ว +1
By 30 I should be starting my own (after devising a way to escape Latin America). l'm planning to be a multi-millionaire by then, of course.
kinda have the opposite experience rn. started in a beeg multinational, entry bar is low af, learned to actually be an efficient employee and good at my craft then realised that : 1- in a big company, responsability is so diluted that if you are doing poor quality work, no one will notice 2- in a big company, responsability is so diluted that if you are doing great quality work, no one will notice 3 - your job is often really narrowed down to a set of tasks ( i was doing backend dev in python flask and i did almost nothing else for 4 years), so you don't really get that swiss army knife set of skills. 4- big company = management ruling everything and it's turn into real world politic with backstabing and cloak & dagger shit. right now i just joined a small (5 yo) startup of 15 people and i get to actually learn tons of stuff and do tons of stuff. I feel like i actually deserve my paycheck in full and learning much much more ( it's 3x more exhausting but for now it feels worthwhile)
My buddy started working at Snowflake 2 years ago, he is now a millionaire. He turned down a job from Microsoft and was nervous about making that decision. If you are young and have nothing to lose, join a startup. You’ll wear a lot of hats
Tried cofounding a startup, built the MVP more of less by myself, dealt with u realistic deadlines, massive amount of stress, and countless restless nights, Then got falsely accused of stealing company IP and was fired without pay or equity, there was an investigation, I provided counter-evidence, my accusers wouldn't participate with the authorities after lodging the case. The case was later dropped. Yeah, that happened 😐
I’ve worked at Startup companies, and I can tell you that the windowless basement office leased from a dry cleaners, with folding chairs, folding tables, cartons of Chinese food, a second hand fridge/freezer, a few desktops, and a server the size of a vending machine in the corner versus the “adult daycare centers” in the fancy office suites/penthouses…the former of the two are what succeeds, even if it doesn’t become a household name.
@@stumbling No, it's a drip pot, run by a simple toggle switch. No timers, no clock, nothing to fail really. They do have an issue with lime scale builting up inside the internal heater, but that's often fixable for anyone who wants to bother. Though shout out to using a kettle for french roast.
The biggest one I noticed that you missed is how the atmosphere often feels more like you're at a frat house than a place of business which I suppose can work for some people but imo is not conducive to getting stuff done and is ultimately just distracting and even kind of annoying.
@@augustoweber7753 We can then move this home to be in the geographical center location of the workers' current residences. Maybe even have a dedicated room to meet and talk about work related projects
Working to death is a thing you should only do at your own company. Everywhere else, remember you are working for someone else's interests. At the end of the day, you pretty much get a paycheck, at best some stock options and that's it. Make yourself replaceable, don't catch feelings. Be the damn best at your job on the contracted hours. It's my best advice after working at some startups. They all were wonderful to work at by the way.
Makes my work experience in a Chinese startup feel like a dream in comparison. It's not so different, but the expectation is flipped. You're expected to be squandering venture capital, but you get so bored that you end up bouncing ideas around and actually do real work every now and again. The employee-monitoring is so obvious and blatant that you can actually ignore it (and chances are that the guy watching the cameras is playing PUBG on his phone or hovering over a toilet with a cigarette). The pay is low, but without having to pay Bay Area rent it's actually livable. A cup of coffee the security guy boiled on a gas stove, with the strongest cigarette you've ever smoked. Right at your desk.
Yeah think of your work as an investment. If you invest into a bad company you will lose a lot but if you pick a good company you get big profit. So pick a good company with good culture and don't waste your time on losers.
Working for a startup out of college can be great because you will learn a ton. Just know that even if your company takes off, the your stocks are STILL likely not enough to make you rich.
In the b2b space: Company never publishes a reliable product roadmap or vision. In reality the product is whatever the biggest client they're chasing wants it to be and the company is happy to immiserate its employees to do the gymnastics needed for that
I see it everywhere. Not only in startups. Big companies and government agencies behaves the same way. I don't know how modern economy works at all. I suspect monetization comes from modes, politics and aestetics, and autopilot with no direction. There is no need for deep self- learning, high efficient and capable employees anymore. If you are on that group, relax. The ship have been sinking for decades and our standards are high. That's not a compatible situation. Let's focus on the real thing we can control. These models are scams, like ponzi schemes. It's a matter of time to them fall like a house of cards.
A lot of big companies have managers that don't know a single thing about the product that is produced and that's one of the biggest problems. This managers don't know what investment is necessary and where to cut costs. It is also very common to bring an incapable employee into a higher position, so he does not slow down the "real" work.
@@agreencat3484 If a company produces a lot of different stuff, the CEO can't know everything about any product and will often focus on legal problems and cutting costs. The CEO will bring people into the management, that help him and do the same things he does. In the worst case scenario, you end up with a management that has no interest in the product. Investors who often have a degree in economics will not understand the problem until it is to late.
@@xijinpingpong4426 I totally agree. Product salesforces and the workes who made them are two complete entities in isolation from each other. And the pressure scales to the lower layer, in the software industry they are the programmers. Who is in a company where the frameworks to use were chosen by people who doesn't code at all? Raise your hand ✋
Everything is kinda a scam. They overpriced and hype "skilled" jobs, so food lowers its price. This way you can have your bellies full and think about useless stuff, such philosophy, politics, football, etc
I was with 3 start ups. I prefer the bigger, traditional firms. A lot of these startup really have no idea what they are doing. But they will tell you a beautiful story.
On the topic of "gamerooms" specifically, between accounts from my uncle, who's one of those guys that's basically gone from start-up to start-up, and the general consensus I've seen from people getting re-educated at my college, it seems like those gamerooms are usually less about keeping you in the office and more about getting you in the door. After all, if you get job offers from two virtually identical start ups, but one has a game room in the break room, and the other doesn't, it's pretty clear which one people will gravitate to, even if they're not gamers; The game room implies that you'll have reasonable breaks and won't be working from clock in to clock out. It's there to give off the subliminal message "We won't work you to death", not to keep employees in the office longer. Of course, that's usually not the case if they put the gamerooms somewhere public-facing, especially if you never see anyone in them, because those companies are the kind that usually punish you for using the company provided property on company time, and don't actually care about your well being. But that's why they have the game room; to trick you into signing that contract, to trick you into working an extra hour or two, to trick you into not taking overtime pay, to trick you into thinking the company cares about you. Not to say every start up with a games room does that, but generally, if you wanna tell, see if it's more practical or more flashy. A couple of 360s and Wiis on a midsized TV vs a PS5 on a bed-sized flat screen will tell you where the priorities lie real quick. And on the topic of Diversity hires, I think you're oversimplying the problem; what that sort of affirmative action is *meant* to do is widen the hiring range and keep qualified people from being looked over just because of their race or gender or sexuality like has been happening for decades. Basically, it's not "Hire a black person", it's "Make sure you're getting all the possible candidates". But then you have lazy idiot execs who want to do the least work possible, and instead of expanding the hiring pool, they just pick out the minority from their current hiring pool and call it a day, completely voiding the entire fucking point of affirmative action is and just making a diversity hire, since that looks good for a photo op.
Lots of great insight - everyone in high tech should watch this. Can add another one - if you have more than 50% wasted on meetings, the company will fail. And another - if top management flies first class - the company will fail.
Speaking as someone who is trying to create a startup company, great video! Very accurate, there are a lot of startups out there that don't really know what to do, they do things because they see other trendy companies doing them. Google offers catered lunches, so they do. Microsoft has Starbucks Espresso machines in every break room, so they do. Or some companies think "Wow, I got $5 million from investors, let's get spending, that kind of money will never run out!" Or they try to make a fancy office as a way to show off, "Look at the amazing company I built!" However, it's not always bad - one of the hardest things of a startup company is attracting good talent, because you can't match the paychecks of the big companies. So instead you try and offer perks - like a game room with arcade machines that employees can hang out at during lunch or get a game in before/after work. In addition, that kind of thing can help create a specific company atmosphere and give a feeling of being part of the team of people with shared interests, as long as people actually make use of it. Arcade games are $200-$500 these days, game consoles are similar, so maybe $5000 to spend on a game room early on in a company life, isn't necessarily a bad investment, depending on the company and its starting budget. Definitely not something to get when money is tight, though, and the CEO should definitely know how much money they have left to survive on.
Nailing it for the diversity stuff... it's creating the exact opposite of what was intended. I have seen first-hand, women being promoted just because they needed at least one woman in a certain committee.... so they found one. And there is a woman sitting in that committe, that doesnt have a word to say, and who is sitting there while everyone perfectly knows (even her...) that she serves no other purpose apart from ticking a box somewhere in an HR form.
we had a severely disabled guy. They sent a private van for him, and he was shredding paper (if there was any) for all his reduced hours, for the same money we made for actual work. You know, like handing the paper to him, instead of putting it into the shredder yourself. Token employees are a thing.
"We'll hire 30 engineers/lawyers to figure it out later!" - the boss when talking about the core underlying mechanics/international legality of their imagined product. In my case, in one of my former workplaces, after being explained the principles of the 'product' we were trying to develop by my boss (he was bragging, actually), I pointed out some underlying flaws in the theory and he reacted by saying he already thought of that issue (aha, totes') and decided to, I'm not kidding, "hire 30 engineers" later down the line to figure out how to fix it! Those engineers never got hired, because the issue I pointed out had no solution that was either possible under known physics or legal in even half the countries we were expanding to.
@@MushookieMan Lossless transportation of energy from one country to another, by way of energy credits, *without* the grids being linked. Sure, you can tokenize quite a bit, but such a thing would require energy storage and trading with 3rd parties to contain or sell off excess energy in real-time - cutting out the middlemen was precisely the point of this entire project in the first place. You can't achieve this purely though software and a smart energy meter, on a standard energy grid. There were other solutions I could think of, but all required either specific bilateral agreements between countries (my boss didn't know if these even existed or not in most cases, because the legal research had not been done yet - this was just a few months before the network was supposed to be launched), access and maintenance to/of expensive infrastructure, or highly preferential treatment in the energy commodities market. Like I said, if you discount all of the above solutions (because they would not fit the vision of the project and because it would be too expensive thus pointless to do this in the first place), the only other options literally violate physics, as there is no such thing as lossless energy transfer across geographic distances through any medium we know of, nevermind to unconnected grids by simply using existing infrastructure. Basically, in lieu of 3rd party contracts and infrastructure, my former boss would have needed a true superconductor (and a cheap one, at that), and science has yet to produce one of those. The project's concept was feasible in some capacity, but not within the parameters he insisted on and, I suspect, not within profitable margins, regardless of the number of engineers he hired. Really, I hoped I was missing something obvious or my boss didn't tell me some critical detail, but the perpetual delays that came after sadly confirmed my initial assessment. I'm not sure what ultimately came of it (I left the company a few months later). It could have been salvaged with some heavy compromises to the core vision, but I'm not sure if the same can be said regarding the project's profitability.
@@MushookieMan Nah, he was legit trying to make it work, but simply didn't realize (or, refused to accept) the disconnect between what he wanted to offer and what he could realistically offer. It wasn't a rug pull - most of the ETH made in the token sale was dumped right back into marketing, expansion, certifications, legal, software development, community incentives, and even some into R&D.
I think the difference between a modern start-up and a business starting out (you mentioned there companies that were started decades ago) is that in the past companies wanted, needed to be profitable as quickly as possible. Then VCs just started throwing money around and funding everyone and their mom. So now the game is to just ride it out until you get bought by a real company.
I have a friend that has this weak muscle condition, she uses a motorized wheelchair to go around. One day she was contacted for a job because the company would get fined for R$ 40.000 (about US$ 10,000 at the time, long time ago...) if they didn't have a disabled person. The job was not even in her area of expertise (she's a programmer, the job was for adm assistant or something), she wouldn't need to do anything, just show up whenever they would be audited by the brasilian government. Of course she refused the job out of principle, because she knows how much she's worth and even though the company would be fined, that's something we have to fight outside work. That said, every "solution" to a "social problem" a politician provides will have worse consequences than the problem itself. A good politician is a dead politician.
I think the worst I got was the "we are gonna pay you next months" for 5 months. That was 5 years ago, I still wait. As a side note, I am now mounting my own company, I have worked on the product design and architecture for a year and a half and now it is almost time to launch it, alone, with the slimest investment possible and the least wasteful spending I can.
Just got out of a startup company for IT, they made us (field technicians) build a fucking gym in the workplace, fully decorated with machines and TV's, no one used it. A few months later 80% of us left, they were in shock.
There are always signs a company is a bunch of pipes when the startup still burns cash many years after incorporation and years after IPO. Zero cash reserves mean master layoffs at the first cough (pun intended). Even big companies play the diversity token, keeping senior personnel and other ancillary members on the payroll purely for the sake of diversity quotas.
As a retired contractor and engineer, if a startup hires you on for contract work, regardless of what it is, they pay 100% for material or specialized equipment to be installed upfront and pay your bidding time in labor at 1/3 upfront. If at 1/2 completion of work and they can not pay the next 1/3 of labor, quit the contract and be sure your contract reflects that. If all goes well you will get the last 1/3 of labor at the completion of the work. NEVER get fucked on material, you will still owe that to your suppliers if you have a credit line with them.
So, I used to work at a startup company who sold 'innovative ideas' which were not even that innovative. We build a product with an iBeacon and an App. The boss was highly but for real highly incompetent. For a product that needs hardware and software knowledge he did not even know how to turn on a computer (which were still running on Windows XP and a Pentium 3 with 2GB of memory, in 2021!). The computer completely froze if you had Microsoft Word and 2 Google Chrome tabs open. The network speed as well as around the 200kb/s mark. I needed to leave a 4g hotspot on all the time because I could not even push a new git commit of upload files through FTP. Basically what happend was that customer found the product too simple, and to little for the price (especially if you need to buy hardware AND buy a yearly subscription, and the product has only one feature...) They played around with the prices, 80 euro for a simple iBeacon, 100 euro for an iBeacon, 20 euro for an iBeacon etc. Yet after 3,5 years there are only 500 (-50 test) orders placed. 500 * 20 = a revenue of 10.000 euro in 3,5 years time.... Because of budget shortages (because they pumped 4 million euro in this product) different IT specialists cancelled there workings and contract for this product, because the debt was too high. Basically they did not fire anyone, they just stopped paying the employees (who got paid shit as well, some around 40 cents per hour, which is illegal, some around 5 euro per hour for a university degree) altogether. Some people waited for 6 months, the highly incompetent boss / captain could talk people out of leaving very very very well. There are employees who got 11.000 euro behind on salary and no change to see that money again. Bottom line: Don't work for incompetent startups!
@@olusegunadebayo5306 For obvious reasons: if you hire whoever is the best, you will get the best. If you pass up on a better employee for the sake of "diversity", then you will not be hiring the best by definition. Just hire whoever is best suited for the job.
@@olusegunadebayo5306 let me draw you a perspective of what is going to happen. Myself, working in a company, which is scared of all kind of racicm and inequality. What I get in the end: * managers, who ask my help to forward email, since they're not "tech wizards", (I work in print section. My job is to produce printing of different sizes and materials). * IT, who is telling me that installing printer driver will take 2 weeks. * Management not able to understand that my monitor shall be special and will cost more as I need to see exactly what colours are. (Up to 15% of dark and bright shades are show as black or white.) As results costumers are returning money as they do not see on my cheap monitor colours when scanning papers. They genuinely think that scanner is faulty and refuse to believe my word. I don't blame them. * keeping a lot of people who are not fit for work. And unfit people are distracting me and as a result I get less job done.
@@AlexMetslov forced diversity sucks, but if they at least accept different people (as long as they're the best option available) they're still doing amazing
I wholeheartedly disagree. I have worked for several SMBs with 15+ years experience and I can confidentally say that a company is destined to fail unless its team has an androgynous attack helicopter.
I am progressing into network engineering from network administration. I was not a top tier programmer during my CS studies, I got into networking though industry job, not my academics. I honestly enjoy both. Software writing and networking. You can combine them via SDN and python automation. But network engineering gets me over software engineering because of topology mapping and protocol design for a network through all the 7 OSI layers. From the cable termination and patch panels to layer 2 and layer 3 and 4 configuration , to control and management and data plane engineering. It rules.
Hell it's not just startups that have these red flags. I've got a friend who works as a highly paid contractor to the Department of Defense, and even he admits his job could be entirely automated and he spends most of his day watching Netflix.
Oh don't worry about your Skittles hiring priority. Any employee animosity can be fixed by Diversity & Inclusion Training. Also any company where the Human Resources Director has a bigger office than any of the founders/executives, just run in the other direction.
As a minority myself working nearly 8 hours a day to become a self taught developer, I want to do my absolute best to avoid a company that prioritizes diversity hires because I'm afraid of being the stereotype to my potential colleagues. The reality that you've given is that it really is possible to embed some sort of subconscious racial bias for people who may not inherently have it.
Most likely you'll never really know and most likely will meet people who already are just racist and it has nothing to do with you. Just don't think about it much, it's not your responsibility.
Overall S.T.E.M related jobs are merit based , and they're plenty. So the people that want them and are qualified can get them unless they have background issues or from another country. I live in an area with alot of black owned businesses so we're creating jobs 😀 as well. So yea, don't worry about the token stuff, just hope we don't go backwards as far as civil rights lol.
An actual thing that was said to all of us at a startup I worked at: “I want to make sure that our next hire isn’t another bald white guy with a beard.” I know that their intent was good, but I got let go and they eventually made several diversity hires. I don’t think they’ve really left the startup phase and don’t think they ever will.
I should add that they were purposely turning away white dudes who were qualified and trying to find qualified women to fit those roles, and it was very clearly making things difficult for the hiring managers who were getting increasingly frustrated at their inability to fill positions.
I accidentally discovered your channel recently, I really enjoy listening and watching it in the background while I work! Thank you for the quality content
I’ve worked for a couple startups, first one failed and the second is about to fail thanks to rampant mismanagement. A lot of these places are full of people that have never managed teams and have no business experience attempting to build teams and manage a business with hyper inflated egos. In my opinion while all of these things are important people inevitably make or break a startup especially the people running the business. Bad people tend to make bad decisions and foster toxic working environments where high quality developers refuse to stay. Then it’s just a cycle of the product quality dropping and investors becoming more and more uninterested in the product that doesn’t work properly until the startup simply runs out of cash flow and closes.
I worked for two startups before I started working for the Big Tech. One went very well, and one went very bad. What had the most impact on the performance was the ability to communicate your intent. Being able to convey information successfully plays a critical role.
I knew the startup I was working were a bad one when it start to hired too many people, too fast. My theory at that time was that the boss wanted to look bigger to have his company purchased by a bigger one. I quit after I realized the management was really bad, never listen to the right persons and that they weren’t trying to have better products ... The company shutdown 7 months after I quit.
Where I work, men get paid 1.50$ less than women for the same positions. All women get priority when it comes to promotions. So imagine getting paid 1.50$ less an hour than a co-worker who just graduated high school with no job experience; and then, watching them get a promotion that a man would get in five years in four months. Makes me think, what was the six years of college for? It doesn't help me make more money, doesn't help me get promotions, and I still have to pay my student loans. I wish there was a way to report companies for discriminating against protected classes that wouldn't cost more than I will ever have.
Have done a couple startups. The single biggest issue is a lack of a realistic business plan. If they can't clearly explain the steps to success to the employees, they have no plan.
90% of startups fail within the first years. If you're looking for work in the field, get in, make the most of any knowledge you get, move around as much as possible to get multiple sources of experience on your cv, and get out before the ship sinks. The best way to deal with "pretend to be the next google but we're broke" companies is to use them more than they use you, and migrate somewhere better using the experience you get
You are such a good orator. I learn a lot from you, man. EDIT: I commented that about halfway in. Wow, you hit it HARD. Yes, I've only been in my industry for 4 years, and have seen ALL of this. Wasted creature comforts when we really only want to be paid more, token employees (which we've actually had really good luck with mostly), people paid to stand around and talk for 2+ hours per day, other people that do legitimately nothing... and all of this at a company of 300+ employees who have been around for I think 50 years. I do my departments' job for them in half the time and get 30c raises... guess who's looking for a new job
I interviewed for a startup for a finance managing role. They had no procedures, no guidelines, everybody was just free to spend the company’s cash. During the interview I said ok the first thing I would do is write financial guidelines and set up controls. The CEO was like no we don’t need those, we like to spend as we wish. How soon are the investors gonna get fed up I wondered? I didn’t take the job.
I’ve also seen software team leads not hire someone because the person might threaten the team lead’s position. That is, the candidate is a better dev than the team lead.
I am currently working for my first startup, actually my first proper job in industry following a short career in academia. The risk:reward factor is very interesting; as you say, it could end up amazing, but going from the stats across the globe, it most likely will not. It is fun though, having that motivation and energy to try and make things work and be the next Microsoft (to coin a phrase). It could happen
Did an internship at a start-up and half way through the company was on life support needing to get a new round of investors, get acquired, or die. Decided to take my first job at a big 5 company instead until I had financial stability and now I have golden handcuffs combined with a jaded outlook on the realistic success of every start-up I see, looking at working longer hours for a 30-40% pay cut and a low probability of success, so...yay?
@@snippletrap not to mention he became something of a drama queen with all the stuff happening within his family. Like, I get he may be going through rough times, but maybe he shuould have kept that content off his channel, or maybe create a second channel to vent all those issues. His main content before all that was alright though.
want to know something funny, there's this coffee machine that costs $20k and Coles Express, an Australian company purchased... not one... not two... but over 10,000 of them to go all across Australia, even the rural locations that don't serve over 100 customers a day... not coffee but actual customers to the establishment. on top of that, they worked with this coffee company to make a hand select exclusive blend, they put filters on the water supply so that the water tastes exactly the same across the nation. Now, you must be thinking "must be some expensive coffee then eh?" No... $2 for small, $2.50 for medium $3 for large, that's in AUD... McCafe sells their coffee for $6.50 for large and they have a staffer manning the $60,000 equipment and have more traffic which ends up paying for the equipment but... Locations that sell less than 20 cups of coffee a day is asking for insurance fraud.
Other points I experienced: - Unhealthy ratio of Marketing/Tech people (we were 1 to 3 tech people for 7 to 12 marketing/directors/... for a deep tech startup in robotics) - The "Fake it till you make it" mentality, they were selling capabilities that our drones were uncapable of as it wasn't even discussed technically (no investment in hardware) - 5y roadmaps with unfeasible/bullshit goals such as "Blockchain driven cross-drone secure quantum communication with AI" Be critical before joining a startup.
I remember working at a fiber optics company years ago. We were always tight wih buying new stuff. Went through two M&A buyouts. Bought test equipment that sat unused in a warehouse, new building, lots more employees from around the area. Then the economic collapse happened in '01. Lots of weird policies concerning hand tools and other things that could easily 'walk away' were implemented that just caused you to spin your wheels. Early development of 10Gb hardware was sometimes problematic.
The part of hiring people for jobs that they dont require that many time is so true. Last year I got hired on a company which wanted to do a tourism website netflix like. The boss was obsessed with micromanaging everything. The thing is he wouldnt even let us do our job in a competent way and be focused on us to stay in the office ( I was a Content Producer). So What happened in the end? People were lazyign out, killing time and not doing their job properly even me. Reason? We did not even had many thigns to do anyways but we had to be stuck in the office for 8 hours... Obviously now the company seems to have abandoned any pursue of following that project since my departure and seem to be facing great economic disaster.... Feels bad but... meh in the end the good thing is I got paid.
The toilet had 20$ soap bottle, 30$ hand lotion. 2 months in still no work for me even though i got paid. This caused me to switch to a company with a scabby toilet, old furniture and a wage with a huge christmas bonus because they turned such a high profit.
Young black man exposing some real world knowledge, subscribed and I commend you. Now, I know why you did this video face to face. Keep up the good job.
I still remember working on a startup and didn't get paid for 2 months just because the company wasn't profiting and I was like "Oh, so employee expenses are not part of your expenses, huh?"
Merit, merit, merit. You need diversity in academic fields, e.g an expert in law, an expert in programming an expert in PR etc. Diversity unrelated to merit is useless.
Man I resonate with this, being the head of a Quality Inspection and process development department but having the head of Operations department making calls/decisions that should be yours because hes buddy buddy with the owner is peak frustration.
you know a startup is actually gonna take off when they have a dedicated cocaine table
🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣 like wolf of wall street
lol
Hate to admit the accuracy of this.
Don't forget the adderall
Made my day,
First Internship was a startup
Dude knew nothing of programming and simply wanted me to make him a whole social media app with an integrated marketplace and AR functionality.
That was fun.
wow that's stupid lmao
I meannnnnnnn..... If you really really really really really wanted to. You could have definitely pulled it off. If you started programming out the womb and understood every single language no problem. By then you should be able to make more than doctors do in my opinion. Opportunities are endless
@@z1lla4 😂😂😂😂😂
That sounds exactly like a previous manager I had lol
Lembe Muhammad full stack developers exist, my guy
Most start-ups are solving problems that never existed in the first place. And then they wonder why they fail.
Extremely underrated comment.
So good
Ah yes, the good ole solution in search of a problem.
But what if I need a nuclear powered cheese grater attached to my piano?
even the ones that haven't failed yet usually do that
uber for example at this point is just a cab company
I can totally relate to this:
Incompetent bosses - check
Boss hires Incompetent buddies and family members - check
Hemorrhaging money left and right and blitz fires 80 percent of staff - check
Tech company with no technology - check
Tech company with no technology... 🤣🤣🤣🤣 bruh! Where are they headed? 😂😂😂💀💀
@@abdirahmann To the moon, i guess
@@abdirahmann all you need are the right mixture of buzzwords and a half-believeable idea and the silicon valley investors will pour funding over your head.
Diversity Hiring makes me cringe so much. I was in a meet with an artist that would work with me (technically under me but I don't care about such distinctions) and she had an amazing portfolio, seemed very competent and friendly, was vibing well with us on the call, perfect schedule despite being on another country - her hiring was all but guaranteed, but our boss just had to throw the "And of course it's important to have more women for diversity of...." line at the end. Followed by some 5 seconds of awkward silence as everyone wondered how to respond to that besides nodding and letting it go.
It wasn't anything major, and we never talked about that since, but I wonder if that put her head in the wrong place, like thinking she was hired because she's a woman rather than an amazing artist with a good workflow.
I’m a former freelance linguistic consultant getting into tech and, being a black woman, it makes the already present imposter syndrome sooo much worse.
Even when you’re confident in your own abilities, you always have that doubt in the back of your mind: did I get hired because they genuinely liked me, or just because I ticked off the boxes on their dumb quota?
Not only do you have to deal with those thoughts internally, but also because it makes it harder to prove your place at a school or company as an individual, and not some political bargaining piece. If anything, being born in the 90s, I’ve had to deal with that far more than the “micro aggressions” these people would rather obsess over.
This is exactly the wrong thing to say or to evaluate someone on. Either they can do the job or they can’t. Hiring someone partly, or just because that person is some demographic to help with diversity target tends to poison the well. Should you happen to hire someone who really is a good fit, talented, and happens to be part of a favored demographic group for the current trend of diversity hiring, have the dignity and good taste and sense NOT to say a damn thing about diversity hiring. That person is valuable to the business because of what they contribute not because of whatever demographic group they belong to.
I avoid submitting to calls for artists if they make a big deal about diversity, I'm not good with the feeling of being selected due to anything other than my portfolio. My body of work is mainly figurative so I recently received an exhibition invite for a show centered around that sort of art, the summary stressed submitting works depicting "nonbinary bodies, especially." Incidentally, I have SWYER syndrome -- I had a hearty chuckle then promptly deleted it. (Intersex people can have long arms or no body hair, but come ON, way to make me feel like an alien lmfao.)
Well, glad to know she got the job at least
I share the same sentiments: that "diversity" talk is everywhere, and I mean *EVERYWHERE!* And each time, it makes me cringe on the inside.
1. Unpaid overtime is an unspoken requirement.
2. Training is non-existent - you learn on the job or die.
3. Getting work emails & texts outside of work hours creeps up on you.
4. They promise you perks when they hire you, & you'll never get them.
5. Having to pay for things yourself, because they're cheapskates.
6. Every problem is placed on a scapegoat employee(s), despite a lack of processes/resources.
Number 3 is only an issue for ignorant folk, you have to be paid to be on call to actually be on call. If a boss wants to fire you for not answering messages that you are not obligated to answer, then you probably shouldn't be working at that company. Unpaid overtime is also legally dubious, hence why it's so hard to actually get overtime in most companies. I know it's a bit different with software development but still, there are labor laws.
@@awesomeferret If someone is salaried, they don't have to be payed overtime. Now granted, the salary has to meet a minimum amount before the government considers it acceptable to not pay overtime, but even so...
Lol. I got a 1000 share stock option at $7.50/share when I was hired (I tried for 3 weeks vacation instead but they wouldn't do that). 6 months later of thoroughly busting ass, having no life between 12-14 hour workdays if not all-nighters, driving to our remote data-center 1-2 times per week (40k miles on my car in a year - figure that out for added "hours") I got another 1000 share option at ~$3 current price...
By the time I left a year later I could've exercised my first option and paid $7500 to buy $1200 worth of stock (was at $1.20 by then). 6 months after I left the VC was gone, the company was bought out and the stock was worthless (was getting delisted at like 12¢).
I said I'd give it a year, and I did. I had no life... 45m drive in, 12-14 in the office, 45m home, pretty much all I did that year was wake up, shower, drive to work, drive home, eat, fall asleep - repeat. We tried to get them to let us work from home a day or two a week, they refused until about a month before I left. I was like a zombie - going back to a bigger company mostly 40hr week job was like a vacation, I took at 10% pay cut even and still felt I came out ahead.
don't forget "we are all family here!!' = we'll destroy you emotionally
@@captainz9 At a 10% paycut, you are still making a lot more per hour. Time is the most valuable resource.
Here's another red flag: Management has an inexplicable aversion to putting things in writing.
same with clients, i deal with it people from other companies a lot and every time a send an explanation via email and they want me to call them i assume right away that they are idiots. usually i am right.
Omg yes. And if you're someone who starts to document stuff... good luck staying there.
Don't you think documentation is important though
@@novaria this ^^^^^^^^
Unfortunately this aversion to putting things in writing is NOT restricted to startups, even in small subcontractors that develop products for the aerospace and defense industry where you'd expect every little thing to have written down documentation has this problem!
Here, let me give you an entire 2 years of business school in 1 sentence.
80% of new businesses fail within the first year.
Some decisions mentioned in the video may contribute to this.
Hydride XY I saw a statistic about how 95% go down in the first five years
And that's even a conservative number.
cool then we should never start companies
@@un1b4ll If you never start then you already failed
Best and hardest jobs to get imo are mid-sized companies that have been around since the Cretaceous era. Their margins are so well maintained it’s frightening, plus they generally pay well (just don’t expect a promotion).
dang I think you're right.. I never thought about how tight my company's margin probably is.. I am in the position you are describing. Cant complain though, I'd recommend working for a place like this to anyone. A small company who have been around for a long time, and probably have a lot of things figured out. It's past the major growing pains of a startup, but it isnt a giant corporation.
Like you said, I don't expect a raise, but it's mutual. They are well aware that I will likely only stay for 2 or 3 years, at which point I've grown a ton, and they can replace me with the next person. I got lucky by getting hired as a junior dev and they took me in and my boss trained with me for weeks. I learned more in those few weeks than any bootcamp I ever attended. My experience gained from that will pay dividends, and I feel like that is a fair payoff for no raises. Tech companies more or less expect people in tech to hop around a bit more. It's common in the industry
literally FromSoftware btw (creator of the souls series and got GOTY with their game sekiro), I've seen their job requirements for lead programmers and there are some things VERY speciflc and complex, but as they say in their site, the juniors can get personal help from their seniors with topics they're not familiarized with, and even have a sort of library in the company to help them. And we're talking about a company that makes games since the 90's, and only started to get successful in 2009 with demon souls.
I'm not a programmer, I'm IT, but this is true in my experience. I've had the best job at a non-tech company that has literally been around since the gold rush
The best job I've ever had (and still have) is for a mutual insurance company founded in 1908. The IT department, where I work, is from 1956 when the company brought their first tube based room sized computer. They've got their shit together. Everything is super well documented, there are reliable processes and routins for doing almost anything, people are super nice, the workload and your manager's expectations of you are within bounds, but you still get challenging tasks to keep growing as a person and to keep the job interesting. Now I see what my father meant when he told me as a kid that working for an big old company with a good pedigree is the best.
@@Masp89 Do they use COBOL? I'm super interested on IT in that type of industry, actuary.
Becoming friends with the accountant is a good tip. It saved me from a startup about to fall, I arranged for them to fire me before the CEO realized it was going to happen. Had to pay me 3 months for the firing.
Startup Companies be like: Yes, you need an 88 key piano and a solar pane built into your bicycle.
Why would you not want all that on a bicycle? :p
Most founders don’t really understand how morale works. Paul Graham from YC wrote in 2007 that if the morale of your employees are not derived by validation of your customers/ users.... your startup WILL die.
If the morale of your startup is mainly derived by google level type perks .... your company is a walking zombie.
Being in a startup can be very demoralizing ... Just know that the lows in a startup are extremely low and the highs are extremely high.
Also most founders think they can keep everything in the financials a secret until the very last minute...
If your runway is one year out and you haven’t secured any funding for the following year or quarter following the end of the runway.....ALWAYS COMMUNICATE your runway with your employees and investors! They need to know because they ALSO have skin in the game.
Please steer clear of companies with “sensitive” founders or companies that push “progressive” ideals for the sake of being “progressive.” This is very conducive to a toxic environment that will eventually shape the culture of the company in the long run.... if the company can still run.
But a battery/phone charger could be smart
No you need an IoT blockchain industry 4.0 ready Piano and "ecologic" wooden wheels made from illegal deforestation in China for triple the price
Can do that...
GTA5
Forgot to mention in the video, meetings that should be emails. The bane of my existence...
You must love SCRUM...
Pointless meetings are not exclusive to startups. But yes, at a small company this would be a huge red flag.
so all meetings essentially? Interesting take on diversity hires. Never would have considered that. You're a smart dude.
Hate.
hahahahha agreed
"Ok, bro, wanna join my startup? "
-"Why not, are u gonna pay me for my work?"
-"No, we work for idea"
Aleks Mehanik the word ‘no’ is useful in that situation
sometimes you get "paid" with "exposure" as well. Fantastic way to pay your bills!
lol kinda true but really it's called stock and like he said it can make you very rich if you get lucky and pick a winner
@@spol do you really only want equity from a startup as a form of payment? 90% of them fail. I need cashflow to pay my bills not equity. Most don't offer equity anymore, they just want you to do 50 jobs at once and pay you very little. If you can find a good and proper startup, then it's not so bad. Gotta find the good ones.
Say goodbye then
Hey, I worked at this company! Ping pong table, cool, fun atmosphere. Great events. And the CEO would frequently call the senior developers and make them work on random ideas he had at 1 AM. Also we kept building and rebuilding the same product that gained no traction with users for years on end. Then "randomly" 1/3 of the company (including me) got laid off and the company slogged along for 5 more months.
As for diversity, I noticed that companies want to hire diverse, but they are totally unwilling to hire junior developers. Because the industry has been white and asian for so long, a lot of the black, hispanic, etc people working were junior developers. How are non-white non-asian groups of people supposed to grow in the industry if nobody wants to hire junior developers?! It's absurd. It's ok to hire people with less experience and train them up.
Don't know how accurate is the racial angle where you are, but in my country in Europe, which is ethnically very homogenous, the very same aversion to hire junior developers can be seen.
There is no racial angle here as far as I can tell, yet junior developers will have a very hard time, especially if they are self taught.
I'm a recruiter for a tech company and i can confirm that its really hard to convince our manager to take on junior even if they had a super good interview and had great social skill / coachable people.
So yeah i can confirm in my case it has nothing to do with ethnicity
Training is extremely expensive.
@@gabrielhuet9370 you miss the original point. I think what's it's trying to get at is that if companies were actually serious about diversity pipelines, they'd be more flexible on years of experience and hire more juniors
@@duhduhduhdiesel1436 ahh I understand what you mean, as there are more juniors that apply that are from different ethnic background?
I dont keep a register of all the people i interview or screen but it would be a good exercice too see the pourcentage if that was possible!
I have worked at a few tech startups and I agree that they are full of soul-less dead-eyed day-walkers. One tip I can give people is to always be on-guard whenever you get randomly pulled into a meeting with HR when you know you've done nothing to warrant anything like that. A company I worked at did this to me 6 months in, despite the fact I was one of the top engineers there in terms of money we were bringing in from projects. Watch out for the dreaded PIP, or Performance Improvement Plan. If you ever get ambushed by your managers & HR into a meeting where they try to gaslight you by telling you they aren't happy with your performance, but want to work with you to get better and just need you to sign this PIP to agree to it, don't do it. Never sign the PIP, even if you have been fucking off, because you're literally signing something that says you agree that you haven't been doing your job, which they will turn around and use as an excuse to fire you 30 days later with zero severance. The company I worked at 10ish year ago did this to ~100 of 250 people a month before they got bought out. After the merger, they laid off 150 people, including myself. However, I knew something was fishy in the meeting with HR and refused to sign the PIP, despite the fact they threatened to fire me right there if I didn't. I called their bluff and refused, the meeting eventually ending, and I didn't hear a word about any of the alleged complaints about my performance again. What I found out later was that they did this to a shitload of people, and those that signed it still got laid off after the merger, with only 2 weeks severance pay. I didn't sign shit, and I got 6 months. It pays to not take shit from HR.
Anyway, never sign a PIP, always stick up for yourself, and never ever trust HR or be friendly with them cus they will always just abuse that relationship to fuck you in the end. If you do go to work for a startup, do it with the expectation that it's only a short-term arrangement and take as much as you can get while you are there. Get as many skills, contacts, and performance bonuses as you can, and try to peace out and trade up for a better job 12-16 months later before they get the chance to lay you off, or worse, promote you. Get in, take what you can, and get out.
Damn, good intel. Never heard of this scam but it sounds about right for an American company
you are a sage
Just remember that nothing has to be signed on the spot. Say you want to read and understand it at home and you will bring it in the next few days.
A friend of mine was tricked into signing a temporary relocation contract to move to a 300% times more expensive place with just a 50% salary increase. Since it was that or be fired, she accepted because it was just 4 months. 2 months in, she started spending her own savings to continue working for that company so she resigned. Startups usually only care about their own interests nothing else.
This is also a good list on things to avoid when starting up your own company 😄
Yes I found this useful for that reason too
Why I clicked on this vid👀
A startup symptom from my experience: Hiring inexperienced people because they're cheap.
This is how I got my first job in the industry. I knew nothing and they took me pretty much because another guy working there was at my uni and because I had made a few crappy wordpress sites before. I certainly got way more from that job than I was able to reciprocate. That company went under when covid started, but they gave me the boost I needed to be where I am now, having doubled my salary since last year and actually providing my money's worth. I was not the only one they picked up like this.
ahh poor bastards. Well I'm glad you managed to get ahead dude, just don't be shy to extend a hand down to others when you get even further ahead yourself.
The people running the company might be cheap and inexperienced themselves. Which goes back to startup incubators being started by rich successful people and not taken too seriously.
You just think they hired you because you were cheap but inexperienced, in reality they hired you because the things they wanted you to do they knew they could at worst, help you handle it. It isn't rocket science.
A proper senior can quickly make even a modest intern code professional grade code with relatively minimal training. It's only new stuff that can trip up an intern/junior.
Right on the head! Company's get what they pay for!!
@L. Kärkkäinen Yikes. Thanks for sharing your insight!
That nepotism line really hit... I worked a couple weeks for my uncle's startup and quickly realized I was underqualified. I spent workdays in the office LEARNING programming. I felt like I was wasting their resources, so I quit.
I wouldn't worry about it. Almost everyone in high positions got where they because of nepotism. Just getting a job is ok imo.
From an employer's perspective, the "nepotism" part is partly due to reducing the financial risk of hiring someone they know over complete strangers. The HR department does take quite a bit resources from the employer. So the executives have a decision to make: hire a person full of merit, but personality and future prospects are completely unknown, or a reliable referral that can hopefully fit well within the job description?
Net results for this kind of hiring:
Pro: A family-oriented organization culture, less attrition
Con: GOSSIPVILLE, a person with best connections get promoted
@@Luuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuu Should have just asked on stack overflow then copy paste a bunch of code like everyone else.
We're all imposters bro
@@Luuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuu i'm curious, what do you do? how do you make money?
btw i love floppa
My first job after college was at a startup. They were all smiles, promised me everything and even went so far as to claim they were planning to move to a particular city I mentioned wanting to live (i later found out that this hadn’t been discussed at any point with other staff, even senior ones who co-founded the company). The following 2 months were filled with poor communication, lack of focus, gaslighting, exceptionally high expectations and essentially zero guidance. When they finally terminated me I was destroyed and completely blamed myself, but over time I’ve come to realize what a toxic experience that entire thing was. Unless I know the guy or gal running it, I’m gonna be distancing my career from any and all startups
I just got fired from a job like that (not tech though). I instantly felt relieved on the same day.
I got a job at a biotech startup that fits your description perfectly. It was a jungle of red flags, so I quit after a month. I'm about to start a new job at another startup but this time I know the guys running it and they are cool, otherwise I would stay as far as I can from a startup.
My experience was similar - false claims on their website, borderline lying to their investors. Put all their pressure on me to produce results so that they could live up to their false claims and become millionaires. At 8 months, HR, aka the ceo's wife, threatens to fire me despite me getting no negative feedback prior to a still mostly positive performance review at 7 months. HR and my manager then proceeded to try and gaslight me into thinking I was crazy for wishing I had gotten any negative feedback from my manager for the first 7 months if he was so unsatisfied with my work. Then got fired at the 10 month mark. Currently looking for jobs but concerned about what they would say about me to future employers
Worked for a "SaaS" startup that was just reselling manipulated data on fancy charts. They had 12 beer taps and a 60 foot wall screen. 70 layoffs right before Christmas, I was laid off despite being in the top 3 for sales while the friends of the founder still work there. Never again. Also had some very shady accounting practices, recognizing future revenue as already paid
😬
It is really amazing how badly managed so many companies are.
Easy to say from your armchair. Making companies is super hard. Mistakes are bound to happen. But if your management can't take feedback get the hell out of there.
It's why those companies tend to fail. But even if they are doing everything right but take on some huge project without a clue..on how to do it and end up in deep trouble with millions already spent. Like what happens in kickstarters.
Another reason I think projects like this tend to fail is because people who start one are a lot of times young people who, first, don't have enough experience in managing businesses, and second, don't have a rich family or enough money themselves to waste on the first years.
Actually though, even established businesses, the name recognition alone keeps them in business and nothing else does.
My advice for tech start-ups want more diversity:
Don't ask people for their favourite meme on the application form.
Don't show off photos of the team eating pizza with some guy dressed as Batman/Deadpool because you think it's showing everyone what a quirky and chill employee you are.
Don't say things like "if you consider yourself nerdy then we want to hear from you!"
You can't do that then get surprised when everyone is a white male Redditor.
Wait is this real?
and what is wrong with being white or male
@@astrotecn nothing wrong, just not diverse. The joke is: "startups want to be diverse but unwittingly put in place selection bias in their application forms. haha stupid startup"
Discord is so much like this and they're so unprofessional with their emails to people about getting partnered servers and whatnot
@@Cyberian_Khatru I see
I could write a book on the startup I worked for. It didn't do much of the crazy spending, but the aspect of it where it was all run by family members was where things got seriously squirrelly. You had one family member stealing from the company while people were getting wrongfully blamed and fired for it, another couple of them attempted a hostile takeover of the company, another was having an affair in the office (literally). At the same time, finances were so tight we in the manufacturing division were tearing up paper towels sheets into 16+ tiny pieces to clean equipment but then the company would throw these lavish luncheons for sales staff that cost more than they were paying me in 6 months. Another executive got so angry at me, once, over something super petty and unimportant (they had temper issues), that I was pulled back into the warehouse and chewed out by this exec while they clenched their fists and huffed like a raging bull. It was bizarre.
That second to last sentence about you being chewed out by that guy produced such a visceral mental image that I could feel it in my soul
What a ride on experience... Lol
Family-run business are the fucking worst, in my experience. Completely despotic, unfair and ridiculous.
That was a nightmare!!!
Dude, that is insane
Not a "startup", but a friend of mine told me that he was working as a chef at the restaurant run by a bored housewife of a wealthy businessman decided that she is "free and independent" -- with the husband's money, ofc. And instead of buying a proper kitchen equipment, she decided to buy a chandelier for a couple of millions despite him explaining how important kitchen eq is. The food ended up being uncooked or cold, because the equipment was that awful -- but there was that chandelier... Which is completely tasteless.
sounds about right.
Come on if you were a wife of a wealthy businessman are you saying you won’t buy chandelier for your new restaurant. You might as well not call it a restaurant without a chandelier. 😂
sounds like a kitchen nightmare episode
I worked at a startup that had a 8000 € coffee machine :') and the thing always blocked and created a goddamn mess. They also had a stocked bar with wine racks and (broken) designer chairs. Place sank after 4 or 5 years.
There's a few more recognisable points eg token employees, nepotism, etc etc :)
I had a boss who hired 2 people who he thought were so crappy, they could never leave. Turns out they both tried to get him fired and destroyed the entire division to the point it was outsourced.
Startups are good for a lot of people for one simple reason: The barrier to entry is extremely low.
Most people are shit at programming even people that graduated fancy CS degrees, bootcamps etc. A lot of people can't fake it well enough to just jump into one of the big companies but a startup is so much easier to get into. The people doing the interviews at a startup are usually faking it too.
Work a few years at a bunch of startups and get good on their time and money. Get your wank work done and spend the rest of the time consuming as much stuff you're interested in as possible, get your name on some opensource projects etc... then when you're into your 30s get out the resume, add all of that startup cool tech buzzword bingo crap onto to it and get yourself and nice easy experienced level job at a bigger more stable corporation.
By 30 I should be starting my own (after devising a way to escape Latin America). l'm planning to be a multi-millionaire by then, of course.
@ right on
I'm 27 and started learning last week. Lmao.
@@improvisedchaos8904 learning what exactly?
kinda have the opposite experience rn.
started in a beeg multinational, entry bar is low af, learned to actually be an efficient employee and good at my craft then realised that :
1- in a big company, responsability is so diluted that if you are doing poor quality work, no one will notice
2- in a big company, responsability is so diluted that if you are doing great quality work, no one will notice
3 - your job is often really narrowed down to a set of tasks ( i was doing backend dev in python flask and i did almost nothing else for 4 years), so you don't really get that swiss army knife set of skills.
4- big company = management ruling everything and it's turn into real world politic with backstabing and cloak & dagger shit.
right now i just joined a small (5 yo) startup of 15 people and i get to actually learn tons of stuff and do tons of stuff. I feel like i actually deserve my paycheck in full and learning much much more ( it's 3x more exhausting but for now it feels worthwhile)
My buddy started working at Snowflake 2 years ago, he is now a millionaire. He turned down a job from Microsoft and was nervous about making that decision. If you are young and have nothing to lose, join a startup. You’ll wear a lot of hats
Your buddy won the lottery.
@Mialisus a fez
@Mialisus oy vey
@Mialisus one can only wish :p
@@labadaba5088 hes just being antisemetic
Tried cofounding a startup, built the MVP more of less by myself, dealt with u realistic deadlines, massive amount of stress, and countless restless nights,
Then got falsely accused of stealing company IP and was fired without pay or equity, there was an investigation, I provided counter-evidence, my accusers wouldn't participate with the authorities after lodging the case. The case was later dropped.
Yeah, that happened 😐
WTF
OMG this sounds horrible. I'm so sorry for you
I’ve worked at Startup companies, and I can tell you that the windowless basement office leased from a dry cleaners, with folding chairs, folding tables, cartons of Chinese food, a second hand fridge/freezer, a few desktops, and a server the size of a vending machine in the corner versus the “adult daycare centers” in the fancy office suites/penthouses…the former of the two are what succeeds, even if it doesn’t become a household name.
My boss bought a $15 coffee maker two years ago. Should I be worried?
Definitely!
If it was $15 and it worked for some time, I'd say your boss was smart.
You should be terrified. Do you think a machine that lasts 2 years is worth only 15 dollars? Clearly something fishy is afoot.
$15 coffee maker???... A kettle?
@@stumbling No, it's a drip pot, run by a simple toggle switch. No timers, no clock, nothing to fail really. They do have an issue with lime scale builting up inside the internal heater, but that's often fixable for anyone who wants to bother.
Though shout out to using a kettle for french roast.
The biggest one I noticed that you missed is how the atmosphere often feels more like you're at a frat house than a place of business which I suppose can work for some people but imo is not conducive to getting stuff done and is ultimately just distracting and even kind of annoying.
Here's a crazy idea: no need for an office space. You would save so much money letting people work from home!
But how would management micro manage employees and squeeze every last ounce of productivity then?
@@yuridavila6095 you can have everyone working in one home.
@@augustoweber7753 We can then move this home to be in the geographical center location of the workers' current residences.
Maybe even have a dedicated room to meet and talk about work related projects
Yeah, it's great. Now I can browse TH-cam without feeling self-conscious.
personal experience tells me efficiency drops when you do that
Working to death is a thing you should only do at your own company. Everywhere else, remember you are working for someone else's interests. At the end of the day, you pretty much get a paycheck, at best some stock options and that's it. Make yourself replaceable, don't catch feelings. Be the damn best at your job on the contracted hours. It's my best advice after working at some startups. They all were wonderful to work at by the way.
Unless you are super early. If you have more than 1%, I don't think this applies.
Makes my work experience in a Chinese startup feel like a dream in comparison. It's not so different, but the expectation is flipped. You're expected to be squandering venture capital, but you get so bored that you end up bouncing ideas around and actually do real work every now and again. The employee-monitoring is so obvious and blatant that you can actually ignore it (and chances are that the guy watching the cameras is playing PUBG on his phone or hovering over a toilet with a cigarette). The pay is low, but without having to pay Bay Area rent it's actually livable.
A cup of coffee the security guy boiled on a gas stove, with the strongest cigarette you've ever smoked. Right at your desk.
Hows the strongest cigaratte you've ever smoked?
Gonna be honest, I wouldn't mind being paid to do nothing.
@@thetruegoldenknight it gets very anxiety-inducing after a while and can mess with your head
@@TheAzurefang skill issue
I think startups can have the best as well as the worst opportunity. Choose a Fortune 500 company if you want a cookie-cutter, boring career.
Yeah think of your work as an investment. If you invest into a bad company you will lose a lot but if you pick a good company you get big profit. So pick a good company with good culture and don't waste your time on losers.
Working for a startup out of college can be great because you will learn a ton. Just know that even if your company takes off, the your stocks are STILL likely not enough to make you rich.
Mozilla is a prime example of this and it isn't even a start up company.
Why so?
How so? Just curious
@@MasayaShida they have a ton of Googles money thrown at them since Google needs them to avoid an anti-trust lawsuit with Chrome
Have you worked at Mozilla?
@@callowaysutton thanks
In the b2b space: Company never publishes a reliable product roadmap or vision. In reality the product is whatever the biggest client they're chasing wants it to be and the company is happy to immiserate its employees to do the gymnastics needed for that
Sounds like you should have put more work into figuring out if the company is right for you
A big problem is the lack of communication and just expects you to know what they are thinking.
Agreed.
Plot Twist: The company that had a floor full of games consoles was a Computer Games Company
wow that's peak dumb
@@voborny You are such a big clever boy, aren't you
@@sirkastic yes mommy, thank you for noticing
(valve)
@@tomaspereira4797 valve ha a floor full of gabens knives.
I see it everywhere. Not only in startups.
Big companies and government agencies behaves the same way.
I don't know how modern economy works at all.
I suspect monetization comes from modes, politics and aestetics, and autopilot with no direction.
There is no need for deep self- learning, high efficient and capable employees anymore.
If you are on that group, relax. The ship have been sinking for decades and our standards are high. That's not a compatible situation.
Let's focus on the real thing we can control.
These models are scams, like ponzi schemes. It's a matter of time to them fall like a house of cards.
A lot of big companies have managers that don't know a single thing about the product that is produced and that's one of the biggest problems. This managers don't know what investment is necessary and where to cut costs. It is also very common to bring an incapable employee into a higher position, so he does not slow down the "real" work.
@@xijinpingpong4426 That's crazy. Do you know how those managers that aren't technical got in in the first place? Historically.
@@agreencat3484 If a company produces a lot of different stuff, the CEO can't know everything about any product and will often focus on legal problems and cutting costs. The CEO will bring people into the management, that help him and do the same things he does. In the worst case scenario, you end up with a management that has no interest in the product. Investors who often have a degree in economics will not understand the problem until it is to late.
@@xijinpingpong4426 I totally agree.
Product salesforces and the workes who made them are two complete entities in isolation from each other.
And the pressure scales to the lower layer, in the software industry they are the programmers.
Who is in a company where the frameworks to use were chosen by people who doesn't code at all?
Raise your hand ✋
Everything is kinda a scam.
They overpriced and hype "skilled" jobs, so food lowers its price.
This way you can have your bellies full and think about useless stuff, such philosophy, politics, football, etc
I was with 3 start ups. I prefer the bigger, traditional firms. A lot of these startup really have no idea what they are doing. But they will tell you a beautiful story.
On the topic of "gamerooms" specifically, between accounts from my uncle, who's one of those guys that's basically gone from start-up to start-up, and the general consensus I've seen from people getting re-educated at my college, it seems like those gamerooms are usually less about keeping you in the office and more about getting you in the door. After all, if you get job offers from two virtually identical start ups, but one has a game room in the break room, and the other doesn't, it's pretty clear which one people will gravitate to, even if they're not gamers;
The game room implies that you'll have reasonable breaks and won't be working from clock in to clock out. It's there to give off the subliminal message "We won't work you to death", not to keep employees in the office longer.
Of course, that's usually not the case if they put the gamerooms somewhere public-facing, especially if you never see anyone in them, because those companies are the kind that usually punish you for using the company provided property on company time, and don't actually care about your well being. But that's why they have the game room; to trick you into signing that contract, to trick you into working an extra hour or two, to trick you into not taking overtime pay, to trick you into thinking the company cares about you.
Not to say every start up with a games room does that, but generally, if you wanna tell, see if it's more practical or more flashy. A couple of 360s and Wiis on a midsized TV vs a PS5 on a bed-sized flat screen will tell you where the priorities lie real quick.
And on the topic of Diversity hires, I think you're oversimplying the problem; what that sort of affirmative action is *meant* to do is widen the hiring range and keep qualified people from being looked over just because of their race or gender or sexuality like has been happening for decades. Basically, it's not "Hire a black person", it's "Make sure you're getting all the possible candidates". But then you have lazy idiot execs who want to do the least work possible, and instead of expanding the hiring pool, they just pick out the minority from their current hiring pool and call it a day, completely voiding the entire fucking point of affirmative action is and just making a diversity hire, since that looks good for a photo op.
Lots of great insight - everyone in high tech should watch this. Can add another one - if you have more than 50% wasted on meetings, the company will fail. And another - if top management flies first class - the company will fail.
Snakes are venomous not poisonous.
Some snakes are like the asian Tiger Snake!
@@durschfalltv7505 listen here you lil' shit
@@VidCirman 😂😂😂😂This meme just popped up in my mind.
@@VidCirman 💀
not if you eat them
Speaking as someone who is trying to create a startup company, great video! Very accurate, there are a lot of startups out there that don't really know what to do, they do things because they see other trendy companies doing them. Google offers catered lunches, so they do. Microsoft has Starbucks Espresso machines in every break room, so they do. Or some companies think "Wow, I got $5 million from investors, let's get spending, that kind of money will never run out!" Or they try to make a fancy office as a way to show off, "Look at the amazing company I built!"
However, it's not always bad - one of the hardest things of a startup company is attracting good talent, because you can't match the paychecks of the big companies. So instead you try and offer perks - like a game room with arcade machines that employees can hang out at during lunch or get a game in before/after work. In addition, that kind of thing can help create a specific company atmosphere and give a feeling of being part of the team of people with shared interests, as long as people actually make use of it. Arcade games are $200-$500 these days, game consoles are similar, so maybe $5000 to spend on a game room early on in a company life, isn't necessarily a bad investment, depending on the company and its starting budget. Definitely not something to get when money is tight, though, and the CEO should definitely know how much money they have left to survive on.
Thanks as someone who's going into the job market in 1yr this was very educational.
how's the job market
DId you find a good job?
How's job?
who is job?
who the hell is Steve Jobs?
Nailing it for the diversity stuff... it's creating the exact opposite of what was intended. I have seen first-hand, women being promoted just because they needed at least one woman in a certain committee.... so they found one. And there is a woman sitting in that committe, that doesnt have a word to say, and who is sitting there while everyone perfectly knows (even her...) that she serves no other purpose apart from ticking a box somewhere in an HR form.
we had a severely disabled guy. They sent a private van for him, and he was shredding paper (if there was any) for all his reduced hours, for the same money we made for actual work. You know, like handing the paper to him, instead of putting it into the shredder yourself. Token employees are a thing.
"We'll hire 30 engineers/lawyers to figure it out later!" - the boss when talking about the core underlying mechanics/international legality of their imagined product.
In my case, in one of my former workplaces, after being explained the principles of the 'product' we were trying to develop by my boss (he was bragging, actually), I pointed out some underlying flaws in the theory and he reacted by saying he already thought of that issue (aha, totes') and decided to, I'm not kidding, "hire 30 engineers" later down the line to figure out how to fix it!
Those engineers never got hired, because the issue I pointed out had no solution that was either possible under known physics or legal in even half the countries we were expanding to.
If this issue violated physics I have got to hear it. You can't leave us hanging like that.
@@MushookieMan Lossless transportation of energy from one country to another, by way of energy credits, *without* the grids being linked.
Sure, you can tokenize quite a bit, but such a thing would require energy storage and trading with 3rd parties to contain or sell off excess energy in real-time - cutting out the middlemen was precisely the point of this entire project in the first place. You can't achieve this purely though software and a smart energy meter, on a standard energy grid.
There were other solutions I could think of, but all required either specific bilateral agreements between countries (my boss didn't know if these even existed or not in most cases, because the legal research had not been done yet - this was just a few months before the network was supposed to be launched), access and maintenance to/of expensive infrastructure, or highly preferential treatment in the energy commodities market.
Like I said, if you discount all of the above solutions (because they would not fit the vision of the project and because it would be too expensive thus pointless to do this in the first place), the only other options literally violate physics, as there is no such thing as lossless energy transfer across geographic distances through any medium we know of, nevermind to unconnected grids by simply using existing infrastructure.
Basically, in lieu of 3rd party contracts and infrastructure, my former boss would have needed a true superconductor (and a cheap one, at that), and science has yet to produce one of those.
The project's concept was feasible in some capacity, but not within the parameters he insisted on and, I suspect, not within profitable margins, regardless of the number of engineers he hired.
Really, I hoped I was missing something obvious or my boss didn't tell me some critical detail, but the perpetual delays that came after sadly confirmed my initial assessment. I'm not sure what ultimately came of it (I left the company a few months later). It could have been salvaged with some heavy compromises to the core vision, but I'm not sure if the same can be said regarding the project's profitability.
@@DarkVeghetta Energy credits and energy are two different things. Maybe he wanted a lossless transfer of investor money into his bank accounts.
@@MushookieMan Nah, he was legit trying to make it work, but simply didn't realize (or, refused to accept) the disconnect between what he wanted to offer and what he could realistically offer. It wasn't a rug pull - most of the ETH made in the token sale was dumped right back into marketing, expansion, certifications, legal, software development, community incentives, and even some into R&D.
I think the difference between a modern start-up and a business starting out (you mentioned there companies that were started decades ago) is that in the past companies wanted, needed to be profitable as quickly as possible.
Then VCs just started throwing money around and funding everyone and their mom. So now the game is to just ride it out until you get bought by a real company.
I have a friend that has this weak muscle condition, she uses a motorized wheelchair to go around. One day she was contacted for a job because the company would get fined for R$ 40.000 (about US$ 10,000 at the time, long time ago...) if they didn't have a disabled person. The job was not even in her area of expertise (she's a programmer, the job was for adm assistant or something), she wouldn't need to do anything, just show up whenever they would be audited by the brasilian government. Of course she refused the job out of principle, because she knows how much she's worth and even though the company would be fined, that's something we have to fight outside work.
That said, every "solution" to a "social problem" a politician provides will have worse consequences than the problem itself. A good politician is a dead politician.
Como já dizia o outro: O brasil me obriga a ser ancap
Based
Damn straight. Also sounds delightfully based.
Good on her for having a backbone
Also the only good capitalist is a dead capitalist UwU
I think the worst I got was the "we are gonna pay you next months" for 5 months. That was 5 years ago, I still wait.
As a side note, I am now mounting my own company, I have worked on the product design and architecture for a year and a half and now it is almost time to launch it, alone, with the slimest investment possible and the least wasteful spending I can.
Break a leg!
Just got out of a startup company for IT, they made us (field technicians) build a fucking gym in the workplace, fully decorated with machines and TV's, no one used it. A few months later 80% of us left, they were in shock.
If they can't tell you what their business does in layman's terms, it's probably a scam. MLMs often do this.
There are always signs a company is a bunch of pipes when the startup still burns cash many years after incorporation and years after IPO. Zero cash reserves mean master layoffs at the first cough (pun intended). Even big companies play the diversity token, keeping senior personnel and other ancillary members on the payroll purely for the sake of diversity quotas.
I would have noticed this if I still had a job.
As a retired contractor and engineer, if a startup hires you on for contract work, regardless of what it is, they pay 100% for material or specialized equipment to be installed upfront and pay your bidding time in labor at 1/3 upfront. If at 1/2 completion of work and they can not pay the next 1/3 of labor, quit the contract and be sure your contract reflects that. If all goes well you will get the last 1/3 of labor at the completion of the work. NEVER get fucked on material, you will still owe that to your suppliers if you have a credit line with them.
So, I used to work at a startup company who sold 'innovative ideas' which were not even that innovative. We build a product with an iBeacon and an App. The boss was highly but for real highly incompetent. For a product that needs hardware and software knowledge he did not even know how to turn on a computer (which were still running on Windows XP and a Pentium 3 with 2GB of memory, in 2021!). The computer completely froze if you had Microsoft Word and 2 Google Chrome tabs open. The network speed as well as around the 200kb/s mark. I needed to leave a 4g hotspot on all the time because I could not even push a new git commit of upload files through FTP.
Basically what happend was that customer found the product too simple, and to little for the price (especially if you need to buy hardware AND buy a yearly subscription, and the product has only one feature...)
They played around with the prices, 80 euro for a simple iBeacon, 100 euro for an iBeacon, 20 euro for an iBeacon etc. Yet after 3,5 years there are only 500 (-50 test) orders placed. 500 * 20 = a revenue of 10.000 euro in 3,5 years time....
Because of budget shortages (because they pumped 4 million euro in this product) different IT specialists cancelled there workings and contract for this product, because the debt was too high.
Basically they did not fire anyone, they just stopped paying the employees (who got paid shit as well, some around 40 cents per hour, which is illegal, some around 5 euro per hour for a university degree) altogether. Some people waited for 6 months, the highly incompetent boss / captain could talk people out of leaving very very very well. There are employees who got 11.000 euro behind on salary and no change to see that money again.
Bottom line: Don't work for incompetent startups!
You quickly get how good the working conditions are when a "company" has 3 employees, 7 part-time and 79 interns x)
Don't force racial diversity, hire based on work quality. Just don't be racially biased.
Why so?
@@olusegunadebayo5306 For obvious reasons: if you hire whoever is the best, you will get the best. If you pass up on a better employee for the sake of "diversity", then you will not be hiring the best by definition.
Just hire whoever is best suited for the job.
@@olusegunadebayo5306 let me draw you a perspective of what is going to happen. Myself, working in a company, which is scared of all kind of racicm and inequality.
What I get in the end:
* managers, who ask my help to forward email, since they're not "tech wizards", (I work in print section. My job is to produce printing of different sizes and materials).
* IT, who is telling me that installing printer driver will take 2 weeks.
* Management not able to understand that my monitor shall be special and will cost more as I need to see exactly what colours are. (Up to 15% of dark and bright shades are show as black or white.) As results costumers are returning money as they do not see on my cheap monitor colours when scanning papers. They genuinely think that scanner is faulty and refuse to believe my word. I don't blame them.
* keeping a lot of people who are not fit for work. And unfit people are distracting me and as a result I get less job done.
@@AlexMetslov forced diversity sucks, but if they at least accept different people (as long as they're the best option available) they're still doing amazing
I wholeheartedly disagree. I have worked for several SMBs with 15+ years experience and I can confidentally say that a company is destined to fail unless its team has an androgynous attack helicopter.
What made you want to go into networking rather than software development or other areas in IT?
@LazicStefan *yet. Looking at you, SDN 😂
I am progressing into network engineering from network administration. I was not a top tier programmer during my CS studies, I got into networking though industry job, not my academics. I honestly enjoy both. Software writing and networking. You can combine them via SDN and python automation. But network engineering gets me over software engineering because of topology mapping and protocol design for a network through all the 7 OSI layers. From the cable termination and patch panels to layer 2 and layer 3 and 4 configuration , to control and management and data plane engineering. It rules.
'Hey so I got this great idea, I'll pay you in % ownership'
The only luxury type thing I've seen at businesses that are functional is a small gym, showers, a TV in the lunch room and maybe a console.
Hell it's not just startups that have these red flags. I've got a friend who works as a highly paid contractor to the Department of Defense, and even he admits his job could be entirely automated and he spends most of his day watching Netflix.
Oh don't worry about your Skittles hiring priority. Any employee animosity can be fixed by Diversity & Inclusion Training.
Also any company where the Human Resources Director has a bigger office than any of the founders/executives, just run in the other direction.
As a minority myself working nearly 8 hours a day to become a self taught developer, I want to do my absolute best to avoid a company that prioritizes diversity hires because I'm afraid of being the stereotype to my potential colleagues. The reality that you've given is that it really is possible to embed some sort of subconscious racial bias for people who may not inherently have it.
Most likely you'll never really know and most likely will meet people who already are just racist and it has nothing to do with you. Just don't think about it much, it's not your responsibility.
Exactly, not your war, not your bullets.
Overall S.T.E.M related jobs are merit based , and they're plenty. So the people that want them and are qualified can get them unless they have background issues or from another country. I live in an area with alot of black owned businesses so we're creating jobs 😀 as well. So yea, don't worry about the token stuff, just hope we don't go backwards as far as civil rights lol.
An actual thing that was said to all of us at a startup I worked at: “I want to make sure that our next hire isn’t another bald white guy with a beard.”
I know that their intent was good, but I got let go and they eventually made several diversity hires. I don’t think they’ve really left the startup phase and don’t think they ever will.
I should add that they were purposely turning away white dudes who were qualified and trying to find qualified women to fit those roles, and it was very clearly making things difficult for the hiring managers who were getting increasingly frustrated at their inability to fill positions.
"why aren't these humans interchangeable. Why can't I just change the applicant skin color like a video game."
I accidentally discovered your channel recently, I really enjoy listening and watching it in the background while I work! Thank you for the quality content
I’ve worked for a couple startups, first one failed and the second is about to fail thanks to rampant mismanagement. A lot of these places are full of people that have never managed teams and have no business experience attempting to build teams and manage a business with hyper inflated egos. In my opinion while all of these things are important people inevitably make or break a startup especially the people running the business. Bad people tend to make bad decisions and foster toxic working environments where high quality developers refuse to stay. Then it’s just a cycle of the product quality dropping and investors becoming more and more uninterested in the product that doesn’t work properly until the startup simply runs out of cash flow and closes.
I worked for two startups before I started working for the Big Tech. One went very well, and one went very bad. What had the most impact on the performance was the ability to communicate your intent. Being able to convey information successfully plays a critical role.
how is it working for satan?
@@yourmum69_420, better than expected.
I knew the startup I was working were a bad one when it start to hired too many people, too fast.
My theory at that time was that the boss wanted to look bigger to have his company purchased by a bigger one.
I quit after I realized the management was really bad, never listen to the right persons and that they weren’t trying to have better products ...
The company shutdown 7 months after I quit.
1k for espresso machine is cheap, that maybe costs you a 2-3 days of programmer cost
Yeah certified devs are crazzyyy expensive
Where I work, men get paid 1.50$ less than women for the same positions. All women get priority when it comes to promotions. So imagine getting paid 1.50$ less an hour than a co-worker who just graduated high school with no job experience; and then, watching them get a promotion that a man would get in five years in four months. Makes me think, what was the six years of college for? It doesn't help me make more money, doesn't help me get promotions, and I still have to pay my student loans. I wish there was a way to report companies for discriminating against protected classes that wouldn't cost more than I will ever have.
Have done a couple startups. The single biggest issue is a lack of a realistic business plan. If they can't clearly explain the steps to success to the employees, they have no plan.
90% of startups fail within the first years. If you're looking for work in the field, get in, make the most of any knowledge you get, move around as much as possible to get multiple sources of experience on your cv, and get out before the ship sinks. The best way to deal with "pretend to be the next google but we're broke" companies is to use them more than they use you, and migrate somewhere better using the experience you get
You are such a good orator. I learn a lot from you, man.
EDIT: I commented that about halfway in. Wow, you hit it HARD. Yes, I've only been in my industry for 4 years, and have seen ALL of this. Wasted creature comforts when we really only want to be paid more, token employees (which we've actually had really good luck with mostly), people paid to stand around and talk for 2+ hours per day, other people that do legitimately nothing... and all of this at a company of 300+ employees who have been around for I think 50 years. I do my departments' job for them in half the time and get 30c raises... guess who's looking for a new job
I can relate so much. I've recently graduated and I'm working at a startup, but trying to get out ASAP. Everything you said is true in my experience.
I interviewed for a startup for a finance managing role. They had no procedures, no guidelines, everybody was just free to spend the company’s cash. During the interview I said ok the first thing I would do is write financial guidelines and set up controls. The CEO was like no we don’t need those, we like to spend as we wish. How soon are the investors gonna get fed up I wondered? I didn’t take the job.
I’ve also seen software team leads not hire someone because the person might threaten the team lead’s position. That is, the candidate is a better dev than the team lead.
As one Aaron Clarey always says - you don't work for startups, you contract for them.
You have some valid points here. But I don't think they are just start-up specific.
I am currently working for my first startup, actually my first proper job in industry following a short career in academia. The risk:reward factor is very interesting; as you say, it could end up amazing, but going from the stats across the globe, it most likely will not. It is fun though, having that motivation and energy to try and make things work and be the next Microsoft (to coin a phrase). It could happen
Why not just work at Microsoft then
@@benfelps because I don't think it would be fun
Did an internship at a start-up and half way through the company was on life support needing to get a new round of investors, get acquired, or die. Decided to take my first job at a big 5 company instead until I had financial stability and now I have golden handcuffs combined with a jaded outlook on the realistic success of every start-up I see, looking at working longer hours for a 30-40% pay cut and a low probability of success, so...yay?
Worked for a decent startup. Two months in the Boss fired his wife and son. My paychecks were always perfect. Ect. But that ain't the norm.
I would recommend Joshua Fluke’s content if you wanna see more examples of bad startups
Who's that
Joshua Fluke has a huge chip on his shoulder and always has a negative attitude.
@@snippletrap not to mention he became something of a drama queen with all the stuff happening within his family. Like, I get he may be going through rough times, but maybe he shuould have kept that content off his channel, or maybe create a second channel to vent all those issues. His main content before all that was alright though.
Joshua Fluke is a parody channel at this point.
@@marciomaiajr so he's like tech lad or some shit
want to know something funny, there's this coffee machine that costs $20k and Coles Express, an Australian company purchased... not one... not two... but over 10,000 of them to go all across Australia, even the rural locations that don't serve over 100 customers a day... not coffee but actual customers to the establishment.
on top of that, they worked with this coffee company to make a hand select exclusive blend, they put filters on the water supply so that the water tastes exactly the same across the nation.
Now, you must be thinking "must be some expensive coffee then eh?"
No... $2 for small, $2.50 for medium $3 for large, that's in AUD... McCafe sells their coffee for $6.50 for large and they have a staffer manning the $60,000 equipment and have more traffic which ends up paying for the equipment but...
Locations that sell less than 20 cups of coffee a day is asking for insurance fraud.
Other points I experienced:
- Unhealthy ratio of Marketing/Tech people (we were 1 to 3 tech people for 7 to 12 marketing/directors/... for a deep tech startup in robotics)
- The "Fake it till you make it" mentality, they were selling capabilities that our drones were uncapable of as it wasn't even discussed technically (no investment in hardware)
- 5y roadmaps with unfeasible/bullshit goals such as "Blockchain driven cross-drone secure quantum communication with AI"
Be critical before joining a startup.
I was thinking: "Yeah, that sounds like a perfect team for creating *the* new shitcoin."
Then I read your last point.
Yo that last game y'all played was crazy, go Celtics! keep up the work JT
I remember working at a fiber optics company years ago. We were always tight wih buying new stuff. Went through two M&A buyouts. Bought test equipment that sat unused in a warehouse, new building, lots more employees from around the area. Then the economic collapse happened in '01. Lots of weird policies concerning hand tools and other things that could easily 'walk away' were implemented that just caused you to spin your wheels. Early development of 10Gb hardware was sometimes problematic.
The part of hiring people for jobs that they dont require that many time is so true. Last year I got hired on a company which wanted to do a tourism website netflix like. The boss was obsessed with micromanaging everything. The thing is he wouldnt even let us do our job in a competent way and be focused on us to stay in the office ( I was a Content Producer). So What happened in the end? People were lazyign out, killing time and not doing their job properly even me. Reason? We did not even had many thigns to do anyways but we had to be stuck in the office for 8 hours...
Obviously now the company seems to have abandoned any pursue of following that project since my departure and seem to be facing great economic disaster.... Feels bad but... meh in the end the good thing is I got paid.
Finally. We need more people start speak out
You had me at “dead, soulless eyes”. I know this feeling well
The toilet had 20$ soap bottle, 30$ hand lotion. 2 months in still no work for me even though i got paid. This caused me to switch to a company with a scabby toilet, old furniture and a wage with a huge christmas bonus because they turned such a high profit.
Young black man exposing some real world knowledge, subscribed and I commend you. Now, I know why you did this video face to face. Keep up the good job.
I still remember working on a startup and didn't get paid for 2 months just because the company wasn't profiting and I was like "Oh, so employee expenses are not part of your expenses, huh?"
Merit, merit, merit. You need diversity in academic fields, e.g an expert in law, an expert in programming an expert in PR etc.
Diversity unrelated to merit is useless.
Man I resonate with this, being the head of a Quality Inspection and process development department but having the head of Operations department making calls/decisions that should be yours because hes buddy buddy with the owner is peak frustration.
All the recent layoffs at Twitter needed to watch this video. You warned them!
We need a startup survivors support group lol! All the promises and no delivery makes jack a dull boy😵