Why I left the company I was working for
I’ve worked for several companies, some so-called “start-ups”, some regular rather successful companies. There’s only one that I didn’t leave with mutual consent: the last company I worked for (which I’m gonna call The Company). I’m not gonna tone down my criticism, because as far as I’m concerned, nice is boring. With that said, if you’re a former colleague of mine still working in The Company, you’re not gonna like this.
The main reason of my departure was that The Company was failing. It was going down the spiral of self-destruction even though I tried several times to correct things. To no avail. And in my opinion, a failing company with no internal desire to change course, is an already failed one. Don’t get me wrong, I don’t want The Company to fail, in fact, I’d love to see them succeed. Yet, I think that’s no easy feat.
Expanding before having an actual product
The Company was too big for the situation it was in. There was no actual product, but it had already expanded to a 40-people company. A company must never start expanding before having a stable stream of income; and income obviously comes with an actual product. Paying rent and bills for an office big enough to accomodate 40 employees with virtually no income is simply stupid, given the fact that The Company couldn’t pay its employees salaries on a monthly basis.
Design as the center of everything
I’m an iOS developer and have studied computer engineering in college, but my first and foremost passion is design. I can’t tolerate a product with a bad design. And The Company’s product had NO design. You can imagine my frustration. Sometimes I was presented with rubbish designs to implement and I had to argue countless hours with the product management team to discard those designs and come up with something better, and sometimes I was given the task of designing some parts of the product. That sounds insane, I know. I came across a tweet by Nick Finck, listing signs of a failing design team. Every single one is true about The Company. I tried to fix this by forcing (of course, not in a physical sense) the product team to read this excellent article about providing design in an agile team. The response I got:
We know we are lacking in that department, but that’s how things are at the moment and you have to cope with that.
I should’ve started nominating people for the Ice Bucket Challenge, because that was the coldest of waters poured on me in a long long time.
Teams are made up of individuals
The Company has virtually no hierarchy. There’s this motto of “flat structure”, but that model is clearly not working. A team needs a supervisor, to look after things, listen to members’ problems and try to come up with ideas to fix them. A CTO is an essential role, someone who is looked up upon in times of difficulty. CTO in The Company? Virtually non-existent. As a matter of fact, a company is comprised of teams, and teams are made up of individuals. Ignoring individuals is a blatant mistake. There was this nonsensical idea of “individual vs. team”. Having a CTO was opposing the idea of flat structure. This is not right. Absolutely not right. In fact, they were trying to eliminate power distance between individuals by eliminating structure. Individuals make the team, so granting them special privileges must not be taken as dangerous nor destructive to team structure.
Conclusion
No company is perfect. There are shortcomings here and there and I can think of two reasons: not being aware of those because of being sucked into the vortex of daily pressure of working in a start-up, or a missing desire to fix things internally. I tried to inform everyone of problems from an outsider point of view, but couldn’t motivate 39 other people to come up with ideas and correct course. That’s why I left The Company.
