Posted on 04/04/2016 3:24:08 PM PDT by OddLane
Tech startups love millennials. Tasty, tasty millennials who get underpaid, overworked, churned up and turned into nourishment for venture capitalists. Millennials are the Soylent Green of the tech world.
As each batch gets mashed up, there’s a long line of new hires eager to be made into the next meal for the execs and their billionaire backers, as tech survivor Dan Lyons shows in a scathingly funny new book, “Disrupted: My Misadventure in the Start-Up Bubble” (Hachette Books).
Lyons became a strange kind of celebrity a decade ago when he began posting nutty but funny insights as “Fake Steve Jobs.” Today he’s a writer for HBO’s brilliant tech comedy “Silicon Valley,” but in between he blogged for a Boston tech company called HubSpot and wrote this book about it.
(Excerpt) Read more at nypost.com ...
might have to watch that show :)
I’ve been blowing it off because IMO the effort to foment generational war was in order to get their grubby hands on desperate millennials :(
And almost uncannily accurate, according to a few of my tech buddies who worked with people (loosely) portrayed on the series.
My guess, a lot of people working in these environments probably do not have the personality necessary to do well. But I guess my generation is a group of special snowflakes who can do anything they want without worrying about the consequence of their actions e.g., taking out a $200,000 loan to go to college to get a degree that you need to spend another $200,000 for a graduate degree. This whole scheme is forcing 18 year olds to take out a mortgage before they have any stable income.
bookmark
Bkmrk.
Silicon Valley..... it’s fantastic if you’re a techie like me you’ll laugh your ass off
my girlfriend and I watch it and she’s not a techy and she loves the hell out of it and she doesn’t even get all the inside jokes that I get
In tech I wouldn’t say there’s snowflakes flakes it’s the opposite.... it’s an intense intense grind you up spit you out environment
what people don’t get in Tech is the technology move so fast that your skill-set ages out almost instantly
I’m 35 years in the business now and I’ve had to reinvent myself so many times it’s crazy....
it’s a lot of intense long hours just to get bitched at yelled at screamed and cursed at and treated like a dog
there’s been times I work 24 hours straight with just catching a few catnaps on the hard raised computer room floor and those suck
I was offered a job recently at a well known startup that had an atmosphere that was not unlike the one described in this article. “Change the world” and all of that other nonsense was plastered everywhere. Some people have stayed in the building for weeks at a time only venturing out due to some major family issues.
I might have bought a lot of that crap in my 20s (in fact, I know I would have) ... add a few years experience to the mix and the sales pitch is very transparent. This company still has a good shot despite those flaws, but I would have lost my mind if I’m honest. I decided to stick to the non-flashy startups where we do stupid things like make a product in stealth mode w/o a ton of hype and tons of cash from VCs that are sure to leave you with nothing in the end.
You won’t be on the cover of Wired doing things this way (anyone that wants to be on the cover of “Technology Magazine for Morons Monthly” is a beer short of a six pack anyway), but at least you know how things are going in the company and you might actually have a shot at making something that works, and works well :-).
I’d advise any youngster in the engineering field to avoid *almost* all startups like the plague (unless its your own or if it has a good reputation according to people you trust).
Try and get a good job at one of the larger companies first and put a few years in to get a feel for what the industry is like. You’ll have far better toys to play with (i.e. vastly superior test equipment & bleeding edge projects with semi-sane timetables), support from field application engineers will be top notch seeing that large companies love to have accounts with large customers and will send their best for support, and there are certain to be a lot of greybeards that are going to WANT to teach you how to engineer the right way. Startups that brag about top managers being in their late 20s are more than likely doomed (not always ... some have some ultra-bright people ... but most are going to have a “someone that knows someone” approach to dishing out management/lead titles to people that don’t deserve them.
Most importantly, you’ll have a well known company on your resume ... that coupled with your education will be a solid foundation for a career. You’ll also know what to look for and you’ll know the questions to ask if you’re ever attracted to working at a startup company. You’ll be spending a LOT of hours trying to make a startup successful ... make sure its worth your while.
Finally, any startup that has a recruiting pitch that sounds as if some self absorbed narcissist wrote a bio about himself, do yourself a favor and RUN from it. Their chances of success are pretty low. Some of the more successful ones I’ve seen give you a 50,000 foot view of what you’d work on, don’t oversell their stock options & their potential, and pay you a salary that’s pretty much in line with other companies.
I just came across that book today. Read the summary, and will definitely get the audiobook version.
I would love to work for a startup like these. I know they are mostly BS, but hey you only live once.
If nothing else, it gives you an inkling of what not to do when you start your own company. Plus, being able to drink at work is a nice perquisite.
BTTT.
Start ups are like that always have been. Very few make it to IPO state. I always cashed my checks immediately upon receiving them. Sometimes you had to be first at the bank to get any money.
This is not new Has been going on as long as startups have existed. The millinials are too pampered for many of them to survive
I went from COBOL and JCL to Groovy/Grails and it was an easy transition. I don’t see the intensity
Genessee Brewery thought so, too, in the 1960's and early 1970's. They allowed employees to consume their product at lunch breaks.
Then came the on-the-job injuries and the drunk-driving wrecks on the way home.
THAT perk got killed quick.
Im on the hardware side....
Bench Tech....to mini system field engineer...to technical support manager PC company....to WAN network management (NOC) ...to LAN/WAN Network design and now network security architecture
We are in Silicon Valley. The best was when my husband got laid off on the day of his 3 month post prostate cancer surgery check up. We got the great news that he was cancer free in the morning, and then he went to work and got a lay off notice.
He was just not putting in the 80 hours a week like he had done before he was diagnosed. He would actually crash every night from exhaustion.
I hate Silicon Valley. I can’t wait for hubby to retire.
| Edh, You do need a better tagline, but that's ok because your commentary is splendid :- ) Thanks for the inside view of Silicon Valley startups. Highly interesting to me being an industry analyst in the software for telecoms industry. Your advice to stay clear of startups when your career is young makes sense to me. Wonder about your opinion of where the IT world is headed. Let me throw out some observations, hunches, and invite comment from you and others:
Cheers. Any comments, FRiends?
|
I was part of a startup in 2003, but that was after over 20 years of engineering and technician experience. The person who started the company was another colleague in process control and instrumentation. Right away we knew it would be a lean start, but business eventually grew, since we were already established in our professions.
I wound up having to leave in 2011 no thanks to a certain liberal governor in a northern state creating a business hostile environment (hint: His first year in office he refused to look at the state budget simply because it was from Republicans, And then he blamed the Republicans. Another hint: One of his predecessors likes to sue widows.)
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