Previously at Uber, Skyscanner, Skype/Microsoft. I love to help people grow and share what I learned. I write longer articles on software engineering at blog.pragmaticengineer.com.
I assume you wrote this with good intentions, but this question reads like a loaded question. It sounds like you are assuming that VC-funded companies are not useful to its customers, not good to employees, that they are not calm workplaces and they don't make profits.
I've worked at these companies because as an employee, it's been a great place to work and built things that I enjoyed doing, learning a lot of things, working on professionally challenging areas. I chose to work here and chose to keep working at the places because I wanted to.
For the record, I did work for non-VC funded companies earlier in my career: companies that were making a profit. Some were great and some were bad. There were companies where overtime was expected, paychecks were late regularly and turnover was high.
I personally saw no connection between VC-funding and these things. As with the disclaimer, I can only provide my point of view in this AMA.
I mean, to be quite fair, there's a lot of people who have said Uber isn't good to its employees or customers, and it (factually) doesn't make a profit.
One of the most salient features of our Tech Hiring culture is that there is so much bullshit. Everyone knows this. Each of us contributes his share. But we tend to take the situation for granted.
I wouldn't call it a loaded question, it's a question that starts from my point of view as an outsider and that is genuinely curious about yours. (Yes, your opinion, not the ones from your former companies, t on this we agree.)
The logic of the venture capitalist industry as I understand it calls for prioritizing fast pace over a calm productive workspace, growth over profits, high risks high rewards over being just good and useful. Not that they ignore the later traits, but they put the former front and center.
Previously at Uber, Skyscanner, Skype/Microsoft. I love to help people grow and share what I learned. I write longer articles on software engineering at blog.pragmaticengineer.com.
I personally like when things move fast: when what I build, goes into production quickly, and when I get to experiment and have a lot of people use what I do. You're right that VC-fueled startups prioritize going large or going home and thus it's a good environment if this is what you enjoy.
I have counter example on why I never stayed at places that prioritized calm and steady. When I was at Skype, for 18 months after the Microsoft acquisition, we operated like "old" Skype. Moving as fast as we could, shipping new features, trying to keep up with emerging competition, like Whatsapp and Google Hangouts. Around the 18-month line, I was working on Skype for Web: in 6 months, we built it from the ground up and were ready to launch, and ready to scale. On the team, we felt it was key we launch quickly and allow web-based calling, just like Hangouts did.
Suddenly, we had a lot of Microsoft execs appear, who saw things differently. For them, stability was more important than launching quickly. So we did... basically, nothing. The product was ready, we were doing A/B tests for months on 10,000 people, delaying a public launch. As engineers, we grumbled, we came up with suggestions on how to launch and we tried to understand what is causing the delay. We fell on deaf ears. And we had practically nothing to do. After 3 months of this state of no meaningful work, I had enough and left the company, searching for something more exciting. 12 months after I left, the product finally launched, in pretty much the same shape, as it was when I left. By that time, many people on the team also left for other, exciting opportunities.
There's certainly an additional thrill for me to knowing that what I'm working on something that is really important for the company and that a lot of people will use. I've been looking for places that offer this: perhaps this is how I ended up working at venture-funded places.
Also, later in my career, I looked for places where I get an ownership stake in the business with options/stock. Silicon-Valley startups and tech companies overwhelmingly offer this for software developers, even for people not working in Europe, while non-venture based companies generally do not. I found it a good message, when a company valued my skills enough to offer incentives that many companies save for executives.
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I assume you wrote this with good intentions, but this question reads like a loaded question. It sounds like you are assuming that VC-funded companies are not useful to its customers, not good to employees, that they are not calm workplaces and they don't make profits.
I've worked at these companies because as an employee, it's been a great place to work and built things that I enjoyed doing, learning a lot of things, working on professionally challenging areas. I chose to work here and chose to keep working at the places because I wanted to.
For the record, I did work for non-VC funded companies earlier in my career: companies that were making a profit. Some were great and some were bad. There were companies where overtime was expected, paychecks were late regularly and turnover was high.
I personally saw no connection between VC-funding and these things. As with the disclaimer, I can only provide my point of view in this AMA.
I mean, to be quite fair, there's a lot of people who have said Uber isn't good to its employees or customers, and it (factually) doesn't make a profit.
I wouldn't call it a loaded question, it's a question that starts from my point of view as an outsider and that is genuinely curious about yours. (Yes, your opinion, not the ones from your former companies, t on this we agree.)
The logic of the venture capitalist industry as I understand it calls for prioritizing fast pace over a calm productive workspace, growth over profits, high risks high rewards over being just good and useful. Not that they ignore the later traits, but they put the former front and center.
Thanks for clarifying - got your point 👍
I personally like when things move fast: when what I build, goes into production quickly, and when I get to experiment and have a lot of people use what I do. You're right that VC-fueled startups prioritize going large or going home and thus it's a good environment if this is what you enjoy.
I have counter example on why I never stayed at places that prioritized calm and steady. When I was at Skype, for 18 months after the Microsoft acquisition, we operated like "old" Skype. Moving as fast as we could, shipping new features, trying to keep up with emerging competition, like Whatsapp and Google Hangouts. Around the 18-month line, I was working on Skype for Web: in 6 months, we built it from the ground up and were ready to launch, and ready to scale. On the team, we felt it was key we launch quickly and allow web-based calling, just like Hangouts did.
Suddenly, we had a lot of Microsoft execs appear, who saw things differently. For them, stability was more important than launching quickly. So we did... basically, nothing. The product was ready, we were doing A/B tests for months on 10,000 people, delaying a public launch. As engineers, we grumbled, we came up with suggestions on how to launch and we tried to understand what is causing the delay. We fell on deaf ears. And we had practically nothing to do. After 3 months of this state of no meaningful work, I had enough and left the company, searching for something more exciting. 12 months after I left, the product finally launched, in pretty much the same shape, as it was when I left. By that time, many people on the team also left for other, exciting opportunities.
There's certainly an additional thrill for me to knowing that what I'm working on something that is really important for the company and that a lot of people will use. I've been looking for places that offer this: perhaps this is how I ended up working at venture-funded places.
Also, later in my career, I looked for places where I get an ownership stake in the business with options/stock. Silicon-Valley startups and tech companies overwhelmingly offer this for software developers, even for people not working in Europe, while non-venture based companies generally do not. I found it a good message, when a company valued my skills enough to offer incentives that many companies save for executives.