I just finished reading Ben Yoskowitz's Top 10 reasons to join a startup, and I feel like I have to say something. As an experienced programmer, I think of a startup as an abusive relationship.
Most technology startups I've been in have been run by charismatic sociopaths with no actual management or technology experience. They make wild, ignorant, unfounded promises to employees, investors and potential customers, then get increasingly anxious and unpleasant as their unsupportable predictions of schedule and market share don't come through.
Employees end up working 80-hour weeks, typically for low or no pay and worthless stock options that never pay out. Guilty that living the "startup lifestyle" (work from home, come in late, have fun) has caused schedule or feature slips, they push themselves too hard at work, to the detriment of their health and home life.
It doesn't help you much get another job later. Most startups don't succeed, which means that you end up with 1, 2 or 3 years of space on your résumé consumed by a made-up company name that no one has ever heard of and whose phone line has been disconnected. If people have heard of the name, they'll associate it with failure ("Oh, yeah, wasn't that the company that spent all that money and went nowhere?").
On top of all that, the tech experience of working in a startup is usually pretty bad. The engineers are typically unexperienced -- just out of school, or close to it -- and they waste a lot of time and effort trying to reinvent the wheel. The idea that you're changing the world encourages this kind of bad engineering.
You end up cutting a lot of corners and developing a lot of bad habits that you have to unlearn later on. Schedule pressures make you drop important engineering steps like analysis, design, unit tests, documentation. That is, if you even knew you were supposed to do them in the first place.
It takes a lot of experience in this kind of pressure-cooker environment to come out of a startup sane, healthy, and wealthy. The vast majority of people end up with broken relationships, poor mental and physical health, and not much in the way of money to show for their efforts.
tags: startup benyoskovitz work
Wikiclock in the news
So, Niko, Hugh, Mike and Leoben Richardson all blogged about the Wikiclock. As far as I know, no MSM coverage yet, but it should be coming down the pipe any day.
I talked to Niko tonight, and he said that he saw Hugh at Laïka, and Hugh was updating the wikiclock. They traded off updating all afternoon.
Sigh. It's actually quite addictive.
tags: wikiclock niko hughmacguire leonardrichardson mikelinksvayer
Transit strike
We've got a transit strike on in Montreal (see the CBC for deetz). It's a pretty heinous problem -- the maintenance workers are asking for X% pay increases over Y years with blah blah blah pension and fie fo fum and... Whatever.
The city is refusing to budge, which makes our mayor, Gérald Tremblay, officially a hypocritical idiot. Tremblay has been wagging fingers at provincial, federal and international figures for years about sticking to the Kyoto protocol, but when the hard decisions had to be made, he was willing to shut down Montréal's transit system... in summer... after one of the warmest winters in history.
You can blame both sides on this issue, but when it comes down to it the union's job is to get the best deal it can for its workers, and Tremblay's job is to keep the Montreal Métro running. Someone's not doing his job.
The city spends millions trying to get commuters out of their cars and into the public transit system. And all that work's out the window, now. Despite the public call for more people to rollerblade to work (riiiiiiiight), traffic is way up and auto use is way up. That means air quality is going to go down, and our city can go from being an environmental leader to an environmental mistake.
I'm glad to hear that the Quebec government is stepping in to break up the fight, but I hope it doesn't take too long.
tags: montreal quebec metro strike
Calling graphic designers: Universal edit button
One of the interesting movements to come out of RoCoCoCamp this weekend is the idea of a universal wiki edit button. This would be an icon similar to the RSS radio-wave icon that's become ubiquitous for indicating an RSS feed. The UWEB would symbolize that the current page can be edited.
Folks at AboutUs.org have taken the lead on this effort, which could be really interesting. Getting a universally-understood sign for "edit this page" would greatly help with acceptance of the wiki way by the general public. I don't think it'd have to be limited to wikis; any page that could be edited (e.g., on a CMS) could also have the UWEB.
I highly encourage skilled graphic designers who want to take a crack at designing the Next Big Icon to look at the UWEB effort and give it a try.
tags: graphicdesign universalwikieditbutton wiki rocococamp aboutus.org icon