This post is hilarious and details exactly why so many startups die in infancy. Yes yes, engineers are brilliant and without them nothing ever gets built.
And even still, sometimes things get built and never turn into a real business precisely because of this hubris. And 99.9% of the time, the ones that DO grow over time would have grown much much faster if "the business guy" had been there all along.
This is true! I argue here that the right business co-founder who drives long term financial success to the company is super rare and super valuable. The problem is the average one you'll run into at a networking event cannot deliver on that.
They are much more "I give the ideas and I want to keep 90% equity and you shut up and listen to me because I'm the CEO" guys.
This isn't narcissism — it's something that I can't quite put my finger on. It's like my neighbor who loathes all form of public assistance and actively votes against the ACA, etc.; but, when he found out his youngest was nonverbal then went on a tirade that he couldn't get free help form the school. When I asked (my neighbor) about how we'd fund all the other nonverbal kids he looked at me like I was crazy: "just my kid, I doubt those other kids really need help".
It's some sort of inability to generalize from the local to the general? I dunno.
I live in deeply red exurban Texas; and, yes, a lot of my neighbors are like this. I'd guess ... 30–40%? When my wife was working on redistricting & gerrymandering, a Danish group came over. They're the ones who pointed this out, because they had bumped into the phenomenon in Denmark, first, when going door-to-door.
EDIT: I think we can all be like this. It's something I reflect on.
Yes. Most definitely. Personal experience has often changed my approach to, or the salience of, or - more rarely, because I genuinely try to be both empathetic and rational - my entire opinion about, oh gosh... An embarrassing (in hindsight) number of things.
This is inevitable, isn't it? Like, we all learn best through experience. No one can perfectly (however empathetic) assimilate another's point of view. And, anyway, exercising empathy is dangerous, because it makes us more vulnerable to manipulation by people who cynically evoke it.
Where I land with this is to self-limit the scope of my own judgment. If I have not experienced something, then as far as possible I defer to those who have. If something matters a lot to someone else, and only a little bit to me, I defer to them. My model of the world will never be perfect, so I'd like to minimize the consequences of my own limitations.
We all have the potential to be like this, but not necessarily the predilection.
That said, we are all, by default, some part selfish from the getgo, for oursself, for our ethnicity, for our religion (or lack thereof), for our family, etc.
It's our actual, physical inheritance from our mammalian body construction. Pack mentality gives us if not outright pack warfare, then at least callous disregard for the happiness of those in which out-groups we conjure up out of thin air. Yes, kinship theory is real and human beings can transcend it, but it must be a conscious effort to do so.
That is the baseline human nature. That's why history is so belligerent and why our "evolution" hasn't really gotten us beyond warfare, destruction of the Earth, and ever-growing unhappiness. It's also why the most brutal and callous of our people are now our leaders.
These are all personal choices, however subconscious, that stack up into the majority -- and we are, across the globe, across cultures, like this, until we choose to embrace compassion as our core precept, but few have, because they're still in their default state, raised by callously unconcerned, yet confident, "traditional" cultures.
As a boss, I honestly don't care. The business exists to get make money, and if a side effect of that is not letting people work, or pretend to work, in their pajamas, so be it.
As a person, I would like people to think of me as fair. And that's for the workers to decide not a commenter on a forum.
I'm going to assume here that you aren't just a sociopath and are open to having your mind changed...
How does paid vacation or benefits like health insurance fit into your model of the business existing to make money? You almost certainly provide those kinds of perks to your employees even though paying somebody while they are sitting on a beach somewhere doesn't directly help the business.
Think of work flexibility as just another perk. It's something you do to attract and retain the best people and allow them to do their best work.
If it has it's across a population and says nothing about the individuals working for the boss above. It's still up to managers to, well, you know... manage.
They have to evaluate their employees and people who aren't doing well working remotely may require closer management, may lose their wfh benefits, or something else.
Someday, you will find out how unconcerned the universe is about your life of privledge, because new regimes can spring up out of nowhere and vote you out of having a vote, and decide your new govt for you and the rules for your citizenship of this Earth, and maybe they don't care about your money or what you think is or is not fair.
You are as necessary as that old lion, enjoying his pride, the day before the new lions come to town.
Been in your situation many times. In my case, I'm just restless by nature - I've had a number of jobs most people would love to have and I love having them until I don't and I go into a spiral of anxiety and depression. I find I have to pull the ripcord before I start self-destucting.
In my (extensive) experience, I find that there IS a way out and it is rarely found in encouraging message board platitudes. Here is how I extract myself from work situations, good, bad, and otherwise.
- Form a plan. Well, duh. But the truth is that every "I hate my job" situation is born of decisions you made and can be solved by decisions you get to make. In your case it sounds like the reasons you took the job are now gone. That's GREAT news! You no longer have to satisfy those things and can start doing what's best for you.
The next part of the plan is having a plan. If my cases (as with most), the only thing keeping me in the job was the financial commitments I had in life. I have a wife, an ex-wife, child support, houses, health insurance, etc. It addds up so simply quitting is never an option. I find that the way to return my fire, my energy after work (and even before work) when my job has taken away my will to live is to build something new. I don't know what you do for work but it doesn't matter: everyone has SOMETHING they can teach, share, do perform to make more money than they make at work. Everyone. For me it's consulting (fractional CRO) and writing (blogs, case studies, whitepapers, ebooks). In the age of AI any skill you have can be polished up and marketed with a $20 ChatGPT subscription, a WebFlow site (skip WordPress because Matt is a baby) and a weekend of focus. Uber driver, dog walker, fence painter, driveway pressure-washer, there is so much money out there for people willing to TRY that it isn't funny. "I can't replace my income" is a myth and those of us not scared to try live in a different world than the rest of you.
Next, and this is crucial, you need a Burn the Boats deadline. Without a deadline you will never leave your job. Absent any other forcing function, you HAVE to put a date on the calendar and tell yourself constantly "I am quitting on this day." You'd be surprised how much a deadline will enforce behavior.
Now, every day when you wake up WRITE DOWN with pen and paper, not on your iphone or as a mental note, the ONE thing you are going to do today that has the highest amount of leverage in executing your plan. Every day, weekends included. There is no time to waste. Even if you feel you don't know exactly what to do, pick what you THINK is the most important thing and do that.
Finaly, draft your resignation letter and keep it in your pocket, make it the screensaver on your phone, tape it to the bathroom mirror.
good luck, you can do it and you'll be thankful you did. Because once you've done it once you know you can do it again...and you'll never ever go to work at a job you hate another day in your life.
Life IS infinitely more convenient
and
A biproduct of that is missing out on things that are (or used to be) authentic experiences.
Is it a guarantee that going to the grocery store is certain to be a thrilling adventure whereas Instacart is ceratain not to be? Of course not. There is a non-zero chance you meet the love of your life at the Grocery store just as there is a non-zero chance you meet the love of your life dropping off your Instacart order. (We can argue about the relative percentages of each but that's not the point)
The point is not that convenience is bad but rather that the ubiquity of phones (on-demand apps, social media) in daily life removes a wide range of potential emotional outcomes from daily life as a result of the fact that nothing is rare anymore. Nothing.
I've been making a series of changes in last 18 months that fit the "deciding they want something better for themselves." I've lost 40# in 18 months. I stopped drinking alcohol cold on Oct 2nd after being a daily moderate/heavy drinker for ~25 years. I deleted X, FB, IG and LI on my phone 4 days ago (still schedule posts on LI via desktop).
All of these decisions were really hard right up until I did them. In reflection I don't miss the food (yes Ozembic, best decision I've made for myself as an adult). I don't miss booze - which is incredible. I haven't yet missed social media.
To replace SM I keep the kindle app on the home screen of my phone. I read a couple pages of a book then go back to something else. To replace drinking a bottle of wine while watching a movie I go for more walks outside than I used to (10k steps instead of 6k a day kind of thing).
Long way to go, but I'm hopeful. I realized I was doing things that were bad for me (food, drink, phone time) and it was impacting me in increasingly negative ways.
"Next time someone's unemployed, try doing nothing but social media for 8 hours a day, 7 days a week on a couch and see you'll eventually get bored."
I think this can be true while also further enforcing the point. I was a child in the 80's and would ride my bike all over town just doing stuff. Sometimes alone, sometimes with friends. Yes, I know that sounds like older guy nostalgia.
But the idea that a full work day is the only reason that adults aren't "bored" seems absurd to me. The world is full of low-cost wonder. We have allowed ourselves to be captured by low agency tasks like watching TV and scrolling through phones.
The classic consumption vs creative use of computation.
I think people underestimate how much consumption there was in the past. For example, TV viewership peaked in 2009[0] before iPhones were widespread. Average viewership in America was almost 9 hours a day.
> I think people underestimate how much consumption there was in the past
Sure, but as a child I was limited to initial one TV station, later two. They started broadcasting at 16 - 17 and stopped around midnight. The subtract dinner time, programming after bed time and the stuff I had no interest in watching, That didn't leave many hours for TV.
I don't think it's the hours that's the point, because is it really better to read a book, a magazine or the newspaper? It really depends on the content you consume and the quality of the content has gone rapidly downhill since the invention of reality TV.
"On a lighter note, aren’t we all so sick of looking stuff up? You know what, maybe I go to a restaurant and it’s bad. Maybe I don’t know what’s good on the menu before I get there. Maybe I throw caution to the wind and put something in the dishwasher without googling if it’s dishwasher safe. Maybe I get a flip phone and get comfortable saying, “I don't know.” While you’re looking down at Google Maps, the love of your life is walking past you on the street. To feel sexy, we need risk and spontaneity. Our phones kill both."
Eehhh... this overlooks the fact that a company not reaching its expected potential should, by default, change what it's doing. Suggesting that more startups could avoid failure by changing management style is true...and fairly obvious.
Companies hiring the wrong team members may well be the bigger problem. Plenty of companies succeed by building great teams. Plenty fail by hiring the grifter class.
I do agree that CEO/founders need to learn that being "in" the business is required longer than expected.
