Hacker News Reader

Comment by deviationblue | Hacker News Reader

Funny thing about "declining companies", some of these will see more money in their bad times than the sexiest startups in their heyday. It's cruel, but true.

I wouldn't look down on a manager who comes from such a company; they bring a different set of experience that a startup has not gotten to yet. I also think having access to relatively more money allows these managers to develop different kinds of skills.

View on HN

There's a stage in a startup's growth when that different set of experience is valuable, and at other stages it's often harmful.

I.e. the experience of a manager coming from a 500 person organization is valuable when the startup is scaling to 100 people and is building the structures and processes required for those 100 (and later on 200 and more) to work efficiently; there's a lot of organizational know-how and perspective that would be useful to take into account. The same experience/perspective from the same person are not that valuable and potentially wrong/misleading if you're currently scaling from 10 people to 20.

This assumes that the middle manager knows what they are doing. Sadly in my case I haven't been lucky enough to get someone who understands the job, nevermind the process and politics which has just resulted in a lot of firefighting, inconsistent policies, and then being blamed when we don't know what the policies actually are. No matter where you are having the right people for the actual problems seems to be the correct plan of action.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com