| I have been in both sides of the equation. As an employee, it happened three times. 1. I got fired when the product got acqui-hired. I didn't have a significant exit or anything like that. He explained to me that they could only keep the most senior guys and I was ok with that. Was during college. Learned a lot during the time. (My friend was like 10 years older than me) 2. I joined a "dev collective shop" basically we were something about 10 devs and designers that would run gigs and make mvps for startups and share the profits. We had a leader (close friend of mine), very idealistic and charismatic. After a while we noticed that there were some transparency issues about money and how the projects were picked. It was very stressfull, I ended up breaking relationship with my friend. Shortly after everyone got pissed with him, he got me and some others jobs at his brother's company (a big industry) as a form of compensation. His brother was way crazier than him. 3. I worked for a friend of mine that has a small telecom company. Worked for some months, then went to a better paying job because I needed the money at the time. After that I did many consulting gigs to him and we are very close to this day (remotely, but we always talk) As an employer, many times, but two in special: 1. I hired a close friend of mine as the tech lead. I was the CTO of a startup and it came to a point that I couldn't handle both the business side and the technical (code) side, just architecture and infrastructure. He had a very senior position at a really big payment gateway. He joined us and really gave his best to the success of the company. When we exited, we gave him lots of options so he could exit well with us. 2. At the same company, we hired a friend of mine (not very close, someone I met in college) to be a regular dev. He was a very smart guy, you know, that use his own distro and coded his own crypto wallet and the such. The thing is that he was never pushing code. Later we found out that he was doing other 3 jobs at the same time. The CEO and everyone complained a lot with me. When we were almost firing him, we noticed by his surname and after some social media searches, that his father was one of our major clients (like 30% of our revenue). So we kept him and turned him into a tech evangelist kind of guy (he ran a technical twitter for the company). Surprisingly, it yielded a lot of new clients and helped a lot with recruitment. My takeout is that the relationship should be equivalent. You should not be "helping him" or "understanding a difficult phase" and he should not be "helping you grow" or something like that. You both are professionals that by chance are friends. No more, no less. And that your work ethic should always be high, but with friends, double or triple that. Also, I never seen a couple that worked together and maintained a healthy relationship at the same time. It can happen, but I've never seen it. |