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by balinvadasz
5546 days ago
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I have a few points: * Your customers/clients don't care how much you work. The only thing they care about is whether you can help them solve their problems. If you do that consistently, you'll be fine. * More work =/= more quality output; in fact I'd argue that after a certain amount of work, it is an inverse relationship. * Find ways to solve more with less: write less code and still have features. Have fewer servers and still handle the traffic. Work less and still get things done. It's incredibly empowering. * Knowledge, experience and honed intuition more than compensates for fewer hours of work. My suspicion is that a lot the extra work performed at startups is needed because of inexperience. I worked at a very early stage startup and it seems that a lot effort was spent on getting systems to work as they were supposed to (usually bleeding edge systems). We also spent a ton of time learning to deal with the data volumes we handled; in hindsight most solutions we arrived at were known and publicly available at the time, we just didn't know (enough) about them. Background: I'm currently moonlighting on a startup idea while having a family and working 9-5. It can be done but you need to leverage other people's work as much as possible and need to be very disciplined. I use the best systems/libraries/services I know to basically outsource everything that's not core to my startup idea. I also consciously set aside time to be with my loved ones: dinner, bedtime stories, weekend hikes and trips etc. Being successful is only meaningful to me if my kids know me in person, not just as a distant figure. |
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This is one of the most important parts of this discussion, and I regret not mentioning it in the post. Your company is a black box which exposes a limited interface to the rest of the world, namely "What you make and what you say." If it doesn't impact making or saying, nothing matters.
The vast majority of efforts in most companies don't matter. It is painful to contemplate how much total waste goes on, and changing even a wee bit of it (like, say, the Lean Startup movement is doing with regards to waste building things that no one actually wants) is a mammoth undertaking.