Ask HN: Our founders are just assholes. What are the chances we won't fail? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: Our founders are just assholes. What are the chances we won't fail?

12 pointsredbunker1613 comments

Hi hn, I need a reality check. I'm at a job where the founders really don't care about people, and treat employees like crap. We seem to have a good market, with customers who pay a lot of money for our product. What are the chances we will succeed if the founders are assholes?

The team I work with writing code is great. We're strong programmers. People have good ideas and understand the tech. We're able to iterate and ship quickly. But interacting with the founders (one technical, one not) is a constant blame game of poor communication. They will get angry with people for not doing something that wasn't communicated. Any difference in understanding is blamed on the person writing code. This happens almost daily.

My job feels like getting paid to put up with abuse. People literally get yelled at. Get called out in front of the team for "not delivering", when most of the time the work was done. People get fired for dumb reasons. We've had 20+ people get fired or quit in frustration in the past two years (the whole team turning over several times). Is that normal?

I would never refer anyone. I'm stressed all of the time. I don't see my family. I put in so much overtime. I get sometimes you need to work hard, but it feels no amount of work would fix the root problem: our founders treat people like crap. They have fired people and made it very clear they intend to buy their way through any problems by just hiring new people.

I do have some stock and I'm trying to decide if I should keep putting up with the abuse for the chance of a payoff. Our customers like us and have lots of money. It seems like we have a good product that might be an underdiscovered niche. The founders keep talking about how a buyout would be amazing and we would all get rich. But, that's kind of their job to say that.

How do I determine our chance of success to know whether I should stay? Does having asshole founders make us much more likely to succeed or to fail?

Stop working overtime, do the minimum amount of work necessary, and start looking for a new job. They've already stolen enough time from you in overtime work, so make sure you use your normal work hours to search for your next opportunity.

Also don't worry about the stock you own, it's a scam to get you to work harder for relatively small rewards (or more likely, none at all) at some future time, and it shouldn't be an incentive to put up with abuse.

Time with your family and your own mental health are the most important things here, not appeasing these petty tyrants.

Bill Gates was yelling and bullying people (he has admitted this himself). Steve Jobs was asshole. Elon Musk don't seem to treat people well either.

If they do other things great, I don't see any reason why asdholes can't succeed.

Assholes are bad for morale, drive good people away and generally suck the life out of people like vampires. Those you mentioned are the survivor bias anecdotal exceptions who only managed to succeed in spite of being assholes, not because of it. Everyone's replaceable, including the assholes.

See also: Robert Sutton's book, The No Asshole Rule (Stanford prof)

PS: I really do think corp culture falls in one of two main camps: those that defend civility/fairness like a family and those where employees have already mentally/emotionally disembarked, pining for warmer shores elsewhere.

Data is just plural for anecdote. Assholeness seems to be orhogonal to success to large extent.

Successful leaders always put performance above nice. Sugarcoating ruthlessness with lithurgy of respect and caring is the current trend and I think younger generations reguire it.

Did Gates have people quitting in frustration, repeat whole-team turnover? That adds a whole different color than just being a guy who gets fierce, because there's more to employee treatment than volume level.

The value of whatever stock you hold is likely to become severely diluted upon an acquisition. So unless you are holding like 20%+ of stock it might not be worth that much down the track. If I were in your situation I would get an expert assessment of how much your stock might be worth down the track, i.e. like best case and worst case. Then you will know whether that is enough money for you to grit your teeth and hang in there.

I presume from details that the company is profitable and will continue to be so.

BTW are the founders assholes to the customers as well? If so, then there could be cancellations coming along. If customers are by subscription or some annual renewable basis then you will need to monitor the new customers vs the lost customers ratio. It is not unusual for companies to do well initially and then start bleeding customers when poor support and aggressive tactics come into play.

What you describe doesn’t sound normal. It sounds like your management is incompetent. (100% turnover in two years? Who is making hiring decisions? Maybe the stock offer is intentionally uncontainable, and they’ll eventually screw you out of equity too?)

Which VC? (If any.) Mention it to them. Worst case, the VC is an asshole too, and you burn that bridge. Darn.

Slightly better case, the VC isn’t an asshole and remembers you.

Probably unrealistically good case: the situation improves.

One more thing: It is common practice to let employees sell off vested stock during fundraising rounds.

If you stick around, but are still uncomfortable with how things are trending, job stability, etc, devise a reason to cash out some of your vested equity, and see if they will set up a program for this.

The normal scenario is that they need to raise $X dollars in some round, but find investors with 1.1 * $X to invest. The employees end up selling 0.1 * $X of stock at whatever valuation the fund raising round comes up with. This can be a good way for employees to get liquidity at the expense of potential future gains, and it avoids dilution for everyone else (unlike raising money, and then using it to give out bonuses).

http://www.paulgraham.com/good.html

http://www.paulgraham.com/safe.html

The key problem with unfair, inequitable ownership is that a few jerks get rich while everyone else suffers. First employees should balk at anything less than having a say and having significant ownership. Co-op or bust.

I would quit right away and launch a similar product.

Depending on your jurisdiction this might be dangerous. I’ve seen quite few people get bitten by a move like this. Quitting could make sense. If you do take a bit of time to find the next thing you truly believe in. In regards to vesting / stock make sure to work out the exact numbers and make a decision.

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