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As someone who worked as a CTO at what I like to call a "zombie" startup I agree with the poster above me, and it hurts just to recollect the history. You can keep this shit up indefinitely. We're in a weird environment where, with enough endurance, a startup, even one with a miserable high touch sales cycle and poor business model, can live month to month like some sort of crime family looking for the next big score. If you go this route you'll score a contract or two, and you'll think you're growing. You'll hire on a brilliant employee and then fire them a few months later when the money dries up. Your heart will break. Your workload will increase. You'll start leaning on contractors because FTEs need consistent revenue, and your shit investors insist on offshore labour because they don't know any better. Contractors suck and their code sucks unless supervised, so you'll decide to do it yourself. Your investors will get unhappy and your partner will find another naive low tier investor to buy them out and start the cycle over. Your share in the company will drop each time you do this. Your counterpart will spend 1/3rd of their time appeasing the investors and the other 2/3rds attempting to be a top shelf B2B sales exec / account manager which they are not. They will get absolutely abused in the sales cycle and concede to shit they shouldn't. You will continue to burn the candle at both ends like a good technical leader in a crisis and then burn out, believing the entire time that technical superiority alone will win the day. I'm painting a really bleak picture here, but only because I got out after three years of this when I finally realized the nature of the endless cycle of a cockroach startup. The company I worked for is still going, against all odds. Fuck maybe they go forever. I know people who still work there, and from all accounts it's an endless groundhog day of zero growth and pain. Don't be that startup, if the business model is in peril this early on don't extend the pain, just pull the ripcord and, above all else, try to learn from the experience. |
I have worked both as an contractor and as FTE for product/service companies (and startups), and I'm a bit tired with fighting with this prejudice.
The core business of software houses is ... making software, and making it such way that a client is happy with the outcome, pays for what he really need and returns with more projects.
Startups / product companies focus on various business domains and software is a byproduct of their operation. Byproduct that is often driven by chaotic business decisions. Good software houses enforce specification on clients (real specification, not wishes) to make sure they know what they want or need. Good software houses implement and follow correct software development process that enables success of a project (not pseudo Scrum with slapped Kanban sticker on it).
I could can add the many FTEs are stuck for years with deprecated technologies, they don't have practical overview and hand-on experience with new technologies and paid, off the shelf solution. Large part of startups literally burned resources on reinventing wheels, because FTEs where convinced that they can do something better than using a ready solution, or they had no idea that such solution existed.
Software houses are familiar with dozens of technologies because they create and maintain dozens of different, large and small projects from various domains.