"When you go to the Valley now, and when you go to China now, they are working seven days a week in the fastest-growing companies," says 20VC founder Harry Stebbings.
In software development, it’s not that easy. Having multiple people working on the same code adds a lot of overhead. Also, finding another excellent programmer is slow and expensive. (The “fast, cheap, good: pick two” rule applies.)
Plus, do you want two software developers with a good work/life balance and fulfilling ways to spend their free time, or do you want one software developer with mental issues that, among other things, leave him with nothing to do except work and no source of meaning in life except getting work done? The first option is more dependable, since the guy in the second option is crazy. However, if you’re building a startup then you need to take risks and the second option is the one more likely to create something amazing. (IMO, of course.)
I’ve worked in startups most of my career and co-founded two companies. This is dumb. Most startups fail and it ain’t because people aren’t working hard enough.
This seems short-sighted. You want to hire enough people and give them what they need to grow their skills as they work. Invest in your employees a bit. Then you get the quality without the burnout and mental crises, plus you get a company that feels good to work for.
Plus the fundamental insanity of saying efficiency is a single monolithic thing that can only be effectively worked on by a single person. The only reason you have that is because the type of coder these people want to abuse is the same type of person who’s bad at designing code. They just keep stumbling on subsuming additional features into the monolith because encapsulation and code design is uninteresting to their reward centers. That’s why multiple people can’t work on it, not because there’s some fundamental inability to effectively partition work during the production of innovative software.
In software development, it’s not that easy. Having multiple people working on the same code adds a lot of overhead. Also, finding another excellent programmer is slow and expensive. (The “fast, cheap, good: pick two” rule applies.)
Plus, do you want two software developers with a good work/life balance and fulfilling ways to spend their free time, or do you want one software developer with mental issues that, among other things, leave him with nothing to do except work and no source of meaning in life except getting work done? The first option is more dependable, since the guy in the second option is crazy. However, if you’re building a startup then you need to take risks and the second option is the one more likely to create something amazing. (IMO, of course.)
I’ve worked in startups most of my career and co-founded two companies. This is dumb. Most startups fail and it ain’t because people aren’t working hard enough.
This seems short-sighted. You want to hire enough people and give them what they need to grow their skills as they work. Invest in your employees a bit. Then you get the quality without the burnout and mental crises, plus you get a company that feels good to work for.
Plus the fundamental insanity of saying efficiency is a single monolithic thing that can only be effectively worked on by a single person. The only reason you have that is because the type of coder these people want to abuse is the same type of person who’s bad at designing code. They just keep stumbling on subsuming additional features into the monolith because encapsulation and code design is uninteresting to their reward centers. That’s why multiple people can’t work on it, not because there’s some fundamental inability to effectively partition work during the production of innovative software.