StartupsSep 25, 2019
NewxQfI07

Startup woes

I started working at a startup back in June, it was a perfect fit in terms of small team, ownership, subject matter and interest. We are profitable and have some major clients. As we expand our partnerships and our obligations to said clients our workload is increasing. I work on the front end and I'd say I'm good and clean at what I do. I work directly under the CTO who still produces code, but is extremely biased towards cutting corners to get things out faster by shipping barely functional (or barely not broken) code. He has built out a lot of the infrastructure of our services which I have to expand upon, but it's all so terse and hacky it hurts my brain reading it. He also gives extremely aggressive estimation and bad advice and technical guidance which ends up causing us to hit walls and rework major portions of code when we find out that the actual business requirements differ from what he said. Our packages are like five packages mashed together with interdependencies between them (require diving outside of source into other root directories each with their own build targets which should be packages in their own right). I finally got to work on a project from scratch, and it's polished and modular with everything componentized to be reused across any new project. The project was to allow the suppliers of our clients to authenticate and bulk upload product images, and drag-and-drop to group them into products (as well as auto-grouping) and apply tagging to them to feed into text processing and enrichment services, and for our internal teams to submit on behalf of the suppliers. The CTO estimated this would take two weeks, and that we would never need to support internal users. My backend counterpart and I received a set of requirements up front from the CTO (which ended up being incorrect). The backend guy ended up disappearing for three weeks while he hammered on AWS serverless configurations without providing any sort of API definition for me to work against so when I did get some information I was already way behind. Besides the blockages I was constantly shipping code. I got everything hooked up shortly after I knew what the request was supposed to look like, and deployed it to internal users to test. I created a document with testing steps and a place for bugs, suggestions, and other feedback abd I received several large batches of feedback, then my CEO started aggregating feedback from every source before, so the batches got bigger while being rushed by the urgency of the CEO because of the two week estimate the CTO had given, so I was urged to simultaneously fix everything and make design tweaks while also not having a definition of MVP. I can't tell if I'm in bad standing with my company now because of the repeated roadblocks I hit and not having a clear set of requirements, who the users were going to be, or a technical definition. Every time I talk to my CEO he sounds anxious about timelines I'm now on the next project and am able to reuse most of what I already created, but have to integrate with our CTO's monster code base and am hitting another wall.

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stoffel Sep 25, 2019

What a train wreck of a company. Is the CTO the sort who would accept honest feedback?

New
xQfI07 OP Sep 25, 2019

I mean sort of, I approach it delicately - he acknowledges that his code is a wreck but doesn't see anything wrong with it because "ship fast" but it slows everyone else down and incurs so much tech debt I just worry that the CEO may prefer that. I see me and this other guy being brought on from large tech companies with high standards as a deviation from the status quo but I may be under the wrong impression

Microsoft yNiO12 Sep 25, 2019

I wouldn't say this is the company's fault. Their goal is to ship a working feature as fast as possible, not long winded design reviews and endless meetings (come to a big company for that). Unfortunately this situation means you should work 80 hours a week studying the codebase on your own time, in order to be able to ship faster. It's up to you whether you want to do that, but that's what early stage startups are about.

Twitch Gy829djd Sep 25, 2019

Sounds kind of like how they described it in the book phoenix project.

Twitch Vyr839f9 Nov 22, 2019

I really liked that book. High five fellow twitch

New
xQfI07 OP Nov 22, 2019

Update: I've been laid off

Twitch Vyr839f9 Nov 22, 2019

Oh shit :( sorry to hear that

Google bcfvfk47 Jan 11, 2021

how did it work out afterwards OP? seems like this kind of thing isn't uncommon with startups so hopefully you landed okay?