[Shish2k]

At the first startup I worked for, we focused on making a high quality product, understanding the people who would use our software, solving their problems - users loved us, I loved the company. I worked there for 9 months even after the money ran out, simply because I was so happy, but dev team enthusiasm couldn’t save a lack of sales.

The second startup I worked for, we focused on sales. The salespeople would lie about what features we had, make impossible promises, then stall the customer for a week while the devteam would work overtime to build a flimsy fascade of the desired feature. We focussed on delivering not what our users need, but on what our users’ managers think the users need. Management formally reprimanded me for fixing a bug on a tuesday, because only mondays were for bug fixes (Management didn’t actually want us fixing _any_ bugs for existing customers, just build new facades to trick new customers - but the dev team were so miserable at the state of our codebase - things like “it takes 45 minutes to reload the webapp after each code change” - bugfix mondays were a compromise). I ended up in hospital from the stress of working there. Seems they churn through recent compsci graduates, giving people burnout by age 25 and replacing them with fresh, optimisitic, cheap students. That company is still going strong.

I myself, bailed out of the startup scene, and now work fairly comfortably doing SRE work at a FAANG - it pays the bills, and I have permission to fix the bugs. The only downside is people on HN always blaming me for the downfall of western civilisation :)

Welcome to capitalism, I guess? ¯\_(ツ)_/¯