NO STRUCTURE At Startups For Software Developers?!

Transcript is auto-generated and may contain errors.

all right folks I'm just headed to the office uh we're going to go to Reddit for a topic I just got to punch stuff into my GPS I have a meeting it's pretty cool I have a meeting coming up in just over an hour no GPS I don't want to go home um and it's because I wrote a Blog article a little while back and it's funny how this kind of stuff happens um but I basically wrote about how I don't like using nity framework core not bad Bing it just saying like don't don't prefer it and I work at Microsoft and The Entity framework core team came across it and this this blog's from like last year it's got to be almost at least a year old um and yeah so they reached out and they're like hey we'd love to chat and I

was like okay like I promise I wasn't attacking they're like no no we just want to want to learn from you uh but we're going to Reddit for the topic that's just what I'm doing today um and I had it right here it's really it's interesting it's about startups and um this person was saying no feedback no expectations no performance review is this normal mode in startups um but I think it goes into a lot more than that uh the gist of it is really like it seems like there's no seems like everything's all over the place at startups like is this normal um so I want to talk through that because I have experienced it one startup uh like full-time and then a couple of others in in internships or small companies so I can talk about my experience uh I will call out

the bias where I can um but I thought that'd be interesting so this is on Reddit it's on the subreddit experience devs um if you're if you find it useful as I'm talking through it and you'd like to share it back to the thread because you thought it was helpful I would appreciate that uh I try to put out as many videos as I can I think I'm the time of recording this there's 176 videos on this channel and I do roughly 10 per week I try to aim for 10 per week on this channel so um I don't ask for anything uh like monetary so if you don't mind sharing it helps me a ton and just helps bring more people to the channel because ideally if I could have someone sponsor the channel then I can do other fun stuff right otherwise everything's

out of my pocket so really the the YouTube ad Revenue goes towards me paying to drive in the fast lane that's basically what it covers so um we're going to talk through that I'm kind of interested uh cuz I think it'll be a fun thought experiment you be quiet um and I think the other thing I'll mention is that if you have questions you want answered just leave them in the comments or look for Dev leader on social media that's also my main YouTube channel and um if you send me stuff through other social media channels I'll keep it Anonymous obviously if you leave comments it's public for everyone to see anyway so I can't hide your anonymity can't hide your identity and make you Anonymous if you do that but okay what's up with startups so couple things this person touches on are like

performance reviews and things like that um and then they like that's how they title it but then when they go into the details it's it's really like everything is uh not consistent by the way I just want to get my water out before I get too far here come on there we go good thing we're at a stop sign cuz I can already tell like by that is super dry um so the thing that I want to clarify before we get too far into it is like when I talk about this stuff from my experience um I was NE I was never at um a startup that had like huge Capital injection or something like that uh and so I wanted to spend a little bit of time talking about like just how varied startups can be right so you could have a startup that's

like so for example like I'm building brand ghost on the side is that a startup like arguably you could look at that um as a startup because it's like forming a business around something and then you might say okay well in a startup like that like obviously I'm working full-time let's assume let's assume that I was like I'm leaving Microsoft and I'm doing this full-time um if like the first employees that we bring in if we didn't have Capital injection like that's going to be that's going to look a particular way right we're going to be saying look we're literally fighting to survive here um the first employee we bring in if we have to wait until we have enough Revenue just to be able to pay an employee we're going to be waiting a long time so maybe we're a startup that says hey

we're going to be more uh heavily based in equity so like in terms of how we would pay it would be lower but you'd get equity in the company so you really have to believe um and you might have a company that kind of looks like this right right so you might have a startup that's like literally fighting to survive you might have other situations where you have companies that are like so say let's take the same example and then we're like but we're going to pitch to VCS and we manage to really impress them and then we get millions of dollars injected into the company at that point and we and we go to try scaling at that point if we try to build engineering teams and we have other resources do we start paying more attention to like some of the systems and

processes that bigger companies would have because we had Capital injection the answer is maybe um but you might experience startups that got money and they're like we don't know what to do with the money right like we just hire a bunch of people and now we have teams of Engineers but no one's getting performance reviews there's no career trajectory stuff like there's it's all over the place right so it's not a guarantee that having capital injected into a company will organize it better but it's a possibility the other thing I wanted to call out is that we take the same example let's pretend this was my eighth startup and I've done four of them successfully before and had good exits and whatever right they turned into successful businesses if this was my eighth one it probably will have more I'm assuming I'm again this is

all my assumption I'm assuming that I would be able to start it off with better structure what does better mean well I would probably be finding the things from my other companies in terms of when I introduced them why they were effective and probably trying to lean into that so if I would have found from my experience that Engineers are really like the engineers that I end up kind of hiring are generally more interested in career support and career growth so having feedback and stuff like that which I personally think is important if I found that like that became a really important thing early on I would try to address that really early on because I would have learned from my previous mistakes or maybe I don't say mistakes maybe my previous successes even so my point with saying a whole bunch of this random

stuff is like when we talk about startup it could be so many different things and I think there are some factors that may influence how much uh process or how much structure is put into place and it's not a guarantee even right that's why I gave the example with a capital injection it's not a guarantee that just because there's Capital injection people do things more structured um maybe they just hire a bunch of employees and uh don't have any structure and burn through all their cash real quick and then everyone's sad don't know so it's hard to know cuz I don't know the person who wrote this on Reddit like we don't have all the context and if you're listening to this say there's say there's 10 of you that listen to this video and um and you're all from startups right you may all

have very different experiences and sort of situations the startups are at so all that I can do is kind of offer my perspective for my experience and then try to either extrapolate or um you know kind of chat through what I think could be happening at other places so so um from my personal experience uh the type of startup that I was at was that the founders had no prior experience like founding companies was one thing um and so there's SE uh the CTO was the founder and the CEO kind of partnered with him like very early on uh before they started hiring people um this was a company that did not have external investment this was a company that was Cash positive so they were profitable before hiring any employees uh so they were in a good spot that way um I would say

that the it's not like the founder and the CEO were like uh so well off that they would never have to work again or something like that but they were in a good position where it's not like you know say for me if I were to just leave Microsoft and go try doing something uh I'm probably going to be pretty pretty uh nervous right like am you know might have to have a conversation with my wife about we're gonna pay bills and pay the mortgage and stuff so I don't I think for those individuals they were not so well off that they never have to worry but they probably had a bit of a a buffer for themselves which I I feel like is a good spot because it again I feel like it kept them in a good mindset where they're just not it's

not panic for them there's urgency there's uh importance but there's not like panic and I feel like even for me I would probably be like like I said if I were to leave work right now and say I'm doing a startup full-time I would probably have a lot of panic and that would not be beneficial um but yeah no software I shouldn't say no software experience before for them um because one of them was from Blackberry but he worked in sales and the other was a police officer but was working in Tech crimes and building uh some tools but and I guess he had some experience before um at a at a tech company but in terms of running tech companies like no um in terms of like the I would say like the processes that we needed to have in place no uh like

you know software development life cycle what goes into that like no right they they basically had to hire their first engineer who's uh very very close friend of mine um to this day uh and you know he would be like I think we should do this and they're like okay like you're the engineer and uh it kind of started like the software development part kind of started that way so in my experience going through this startup growth and for those of you that haven't watched other videos just for context when I joined it was like seven people so and that's including like the sales and marketing team and the founder and the CEO um roughly seven people it was roughly 250 people by the time I left um you get you get to see everything right you get to see a company go from like

what the hell are we doing to like this is a real company now and my experience during that was like there was a lot of stuff that especially when I compare like the end of that journey to at the beginning like man so many things are not in place right so we um like just to talk about a couple things in terms of software development processes we um we didn't have code reviews we didn't have um you couldn't gate uh your your poll requests or your commits so what would happen is by the time we did get code reviews you would push code to the main line and then people could review it in the the tooling we had so it was always like well it's already in the code base and it's working so like thanks thanks for the comment um I'll consider it

next time kind of thing right but it it was one step forward it was better than nothing we didn't have uh automated tests and stuff like that like that took ages but the per the person that wrote this uh this Reddit post is talking about some of these other things like um like performance reviews and things like like that um I would say pretty early on because we had a really good HR leader um I was one of the like the first managers there very early on and like literally no idea what I'm doing as a manager right like happy to like I'm not embarrassed to say that they had said we think you'd be a good fit for it and it's like okay but like obviously I just graduated from school and like you bet your ass I wasn't a manager at my internships

so like they knew that and I had really good support for my ahr leader so she was she would say like hey make sure you're having one-on ones and we're going to we have to talk about you know at least once a year we're going to be doing performance reviews so that we could have um you know Merit increases and stuff like that so what happened though was like nothing was like there was nothing throughout the year that was set in stone so it wasn't like hey quarterly or hey every six months you're going to be doing something formal it was like you probably should you probably should find what works for you in your team more regularly than once a year but like once a year that's where we're going to make sure we are uh coming together and and talking about performance then

the funny thing was it was like okay well what does that look like and my HR manager was like well guess we have to make that it's like yeah we don't we don't have anything uh by the way I'm completely stuck in traffic in the fast lane so this is going to be a quite the quite the drive I hope you're if you're listening on your drive I hope you're buckled up because it says another 40 minutes which is a absolute but hey it is what it is so yeah like our first you performance reviews uh like in terms of the structure like I had to go help create that like I made the first draft of that for the engineers at the company and then like gave it to my HR director and had her like review it with me and we obviously made

adjustments and stuff so it's not like I just did it in a vacuum but yeah like we didn't have that so I had to help make it now when people say um like I'm at this startup and there's no performance reviews I want to kind of keep jumping back to this as I as I talk through right so um we were probably I don't know like by the time this was happening 20 like the company was probably 35 to 50 people I'm I think something probably like that engineering team was probably um roughly over just a little bit over half that so you know it's it's not like from day one like there was definitely a period there where it's like I have and I wouldn't I didn't even know to even ask about like what do performance reviews and stuff like that look like

it didn't even cross my mind so there's definitely a period at the very beginning where it was like this is kind of the the wild west and we barely took a step forward by the time I put that in place uh with my HR manager so um if you're at a company that's like way smaller than 35 to 50 people it's like a 10 person startup like I don't know man like I would say I don't not that I think it's a good idea to not have performance reviews because obviously you want to grow in your career but like I just it's gonna sorry it's just going to be hard to say but like I feel like this from the perspective of the startup they just don't give a because they have one thing on their mind when the company's that small and that's how

do we survive now like I said it's difficult for me to say that because as a manager I actually think it's extremely important that you have engaged employees you have employees that have an idea of how they're growing in their career I think it's incredibly important but I've also lived through the period of a startup where it was like we just just got to do everything we can to stay afloat and probably the last thing on my mind was like hm I really hope I can have a career conversation with my manager Because by the way I didn't mention it yet we didn't even have levels there was we didn't have senior there was like that wasn't a concept right at one point we introduced senior because it started to come up and then a few people received a senior title and it was mostly

just based on tenure and why like mostly because we have no idea what the hell we're doing but we realized we needed something and we needed to take an incremental step so we did something and then as time went by it's like hm like we have some people that are at this senior title and we're like if we kind of reflect in Review Who's at a senior level are we even consistent like like that's and you can't undo it I guess I guess you could but like we're not like we don't we don't want to undo it and so when you introduce titles and assign titles to people it's it's not quite a door that you can't close again but like it's pretty damn close to that because it's a really difficult conversation to be like hey uh we're just totally wrong about what we're

doing so like you're losing your title like you don't want that kind of thing going on um unless you like really need to do it so um that's sort of another thing to consider right is like you want to be having these career conversations but how you get to the next level and it's like it simply may not exist the structure for it may not exist it might not mean anything right like the title itself like what does it what does it mean at a company that's only a couple of people it might and I say this because I fully recog ize it might be important to you because it is your career but like it's probably just not a priority for the company now if we go back to what I was saying earlier perhaps someone that has done a few startups they're like

hey I recognize that employees ask for this kind of thing and I'm going to get ahead of that and make sure that when we start the company you know the the leveling and the role scheme that we had seemed to work pretty well at the last company let's just start with that in place right we'll start with some structure so you may be at a place that's like that that's great but um my experience going through startups was like no such thing as all this structure right so we didn't have we had to create the performance review stuff we had to slowly introduce levels I think after I left they had um and I don't know how long after I know there's like they have staff level roles where I used to be um I have employees that used to report to me are at

director level which is great because um at the time so when I was still there uh I I've mentioned this in other videos like I was what they called a technical manager because I also wrote code and was a manager at the same time but um they they had introduced a director type position but there was only a career path from a normal manager a technical manager to director so it meant that there were managers that were my peers that I hired that were promoted into director positions but because no one created a technical director position I simply could not be promoted into such a role which is kind of kind of funny um and you kind of just move fur further down the hierarchy as time goes on um which is like uh is certainly frustrating right so I think the the people like

not all of them but some of the people that were reporting to me that uh that transition into manager positions are now directors which is which is amazing very happy for them so like they they created more and more structure over time um was it perfect probably not could it have been done sooner probably um did the company survive and succeed absolutely right and at the end of the day like it's a business so I sometimes I need to say this in videos not because I'm like and I I I acknowledge it might irk some people because they're like wow you're you must not care about people you must be heartless and I'm like no I'm just telling you how a business thinks about things I'm not saying that I love it right that's why I have to call out like as a as a

people manager for me it's always people people first always but when I'm telling you that a business cares about business I'm telling you what a business cares about it's not not my preference so these things were introduced over time the company managed to do extremely well um so that seemed to be like something that could be repeated now I'm trying to think what else this person was saying um in terms of like 101s and stuff like that I think that that's a pretty easy uh thing to introduce very early at a company so if you do have a manager like I feel like there's almost no excuse to not have one-on ones just it's such a low effort thing that uh that adds a lot of value versus like having a fully fledged uh like structured uh um role leveling performance review kind of thing

like that might be a lot of effort for an organization to put together but 101's no like no excuse to not do that so um I would push for that and maybe that's a good segue right because you can extrapolate everything I'm saying to like different types of processes and systems that are in place right like benefits like our startup doesn't have benefits and it's like yeah they might not so like if that's really important to you maybe it's not a good option so like it's just these are going to be compromises that you need to decide if they're okay if that company continues to grow from a startup to a midsize business it's probably something they'll do right so I remember for us it was like benefits and this is back in Canada by the way so uh benefits were introduced and then it

was like I can't remember how many years and they finally did we have um God what is it called it's not a 401k why can't it Whatever It Is R rrsp there we go we have rrsps in Canada so they would do uh matching for that uh but that came later and people would you know by the time we were that big people were joining the company they're like wow I can't believe can't believe we don't have that and then it was just enough feedback to build momentum where it's like hey like people are asking for this like we're at the size now where we should if we want to remain competitive with hiring people in this is an expectation they have so it's like yeah good point like we should we should probably talk to our uh benefits providers and set these things up

but it's part of growing so the segue that I wanted to do is kind of uh like I said if you extrap some of these things to different aspects of uh working at a company you could probably say okay let me repeat the thought experiment for a startup and what I want to talk more about I guess how much time do I got left here um I hate these stupid Google Map things that pop over I got 20 minutes still that doesn't seem right um but what I'd like to talk about is you're in this situation okay and you're you're getting frustrated and I feel like that's fair I'm not telling you I hope that maybe it wasn't obvious I'm not telling you like you're not allowed to feel a certain way like if you're like hey it's really frustrating that we don't have leveling

here or it's really frustrating that we don't do more for performance reviews I hear you like I hear you because I was a manager for 8 years at that last company basically taking that feedback back and going wow it would be it's kind of crappy that we don't do this or I really wish that we did that and it's like okay like let me let me bubble that up and what I want to say is that I think it's actually important that you do raise awareness to that stuff right I think you need to personally my perspective on this is like I think you need to be able to understand that you know a company is not just going to like do what like drop everything they're doing to do what you say so if you're like we need benefits or else it's like they're

they might be like I don't know man like I guess it's or else then so see you later um so you need to be willing to accept that it's like maybe not now maybe it's not when you want it but I do think that it's very important that you raise awareness to things right if just to give you an example like on the benefits there's a there's a million things that a startup can try and do as they're growing to make things better right and if they're not getting feedback they as in like leadership are not getting feedback on what's most important they'll prioritize things that they think are so if you're like hey I think having benefits is going to be a really important thing for me to like want to stay working at a place like this and your colleagues are doing the

same same thing then there'll be more awareness to that and that will likely be something that gets put in place sooner but if you remain just frustrated and quiet then it's it's kind of like just not having a vote or a say in what's important to you so I always recommend that people are vocal about stuff but you need to have the same sort of understanding that like just being vocal doesn't mean that like it happens instantly so I I like I said I I realize sometimes I say stuff like this and people are like oh okay well thanks um but I I just think it's reality right that's why I'm trying to be very clear startups are they're fighting to survive the the ones that are injected with tons of capital like I would say maybe it doesn't feel like they're fighting to survive

they are um and the plan for the the people that are running the company is just to have a a higher valuation and get out but like just cuz money was put in doesn't mean money continues to come in from selling products and services right so if you're a company's strategy for making money is just from investors then like I don't know doesn't seem like a a sustainable business model but some people some people do very well that way I suppose um I guess my thought would be that if I were at a company like that I should probably not expect that they they care about the systems and processes in place for employees because it sounds like it's not meant to be a sustainable thing maybe that's my bias I've never worked at a company that was just heavy on the capital injection right

um if they're heavy on the capital injection but trying to to do things to transform it into something that is generating revenue is sustain is profitable great like I think that's awesome and I think that probably what you would notice at places like that is that they genuinely start to introduce the things that you would expect at companies like they're going to be introducing benefits they're going to be introducing leveling and and more structure and stuff like that because they're they're trying to use the capital to to shortcut themselves to a position like that where they're saying hey like yes we're going to use the capital to obviously scale the business but at scale if you can't just have like 50 engineers and no one has any idea what's going on in terms of like their career growth or like I don't know like tenure

or anything like that I'm not saying it's impossible but like it's probably going to be a little weird and probably going to have people making some noise about it but I think the most important part is is um if you're in a situation like that you know having visibility or sorry raising visibility nice let's get in the lanes cool okay I will probably wrap it up there um I hope that was kind of helpful not too ranty but overall um oh maybe okay maybe one more thing maybe one more thing because I've been thinking about a way to say this and I still don't think I have a good way so I wanted to try cuz it's come up in a couple videos and I'm like hey you should try like approaching it from this angle um one thing I I wanted to say about

startups is like and this isn't gatekeeping startups by the way um I I want to add that disclaimer in like said I don't know how to say it properly yet what I'm about to say is not intended to gatekeep startups but I genuinely think that there are some people based on their personality types and their goals that may not Thrive at startups okay and what I mean by that is like if you are going into a startup having the expectation that there is a ton of structure if that's like what you need to be successful I I suspect that you will probably find it very very challenging and again I'm not saying that you can't or you shouldn't or you're bad or you're worse or anything like that not at all but I think that for me my expectations of structure at a startup I

would set them extremely low so if I were in a position where let's say right now I'm like I work at Microsoft and I'm considering my next opportunity for me would I like to go to a place that has structure I mean there's there's a lot more factors so this is going to sound like a weird example sorry but do does a next place I go to do I want it to have a lot of structure or do I want to kind of embrace the chos again right because if I'm at a point where I'm like no I want that structure like um I'm maybe for me like I need more routine I want to make sure that I'm I have a lot more obvious progression in my career at this at this stage of my career then maybe I would say like no like

a startup or many startups will not be a good fit for me right now right so it's not it's not about saying like oh you're not cut out for it you're not good enough for a startup not at all I don't mean that in in any way um I'm just saying that I think if you have different expectations of startups and they don't align with what you need for Success you may find it very challenging and the ex just to be clear you can make the exact argument about things the other way because I know lots of people from like when I I create a lot of content online right so I know there are tons of people that would say I would never work at a big tech company or any big company because there's so much structure and things in place I feel

like I could never get anything done I would hate it it doesn't mean that they're not good enough to do it or they're incapable but that's not what they're looking for for Success so I wanted to just add that piece in because I think that it's important um you know the per I didn't even read the whole Reddit post but the the person who is posting it just as an example like maybe maybe their expectations of what they want for Success maybe that's not uh I don't want to say realistic not common not a common set of things that happens at a startup at least to that scale so I think that's the last part I wanted to say um and we'll wrap it up there because there's still a few minutes to the office instead of me boring you we'll wrap it up so

thanks so much for being here if you thought that was helpful and you thought that it might be a good contribution to the Reddit thread that's from experienced devs by the time I post this you might have to scroll down a little bit um but this is for the person that was talking about no performance reviews and none of the structure at startup so thank you so much for tuning in I appreciate you being here and I will see you next time take care