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Comment by yowlingcat | Hacker News Reader

Agreed, this is not just disturbing but embarrassing. Really, they couldn't hire an SRE to cover like, half a shift, enough to sleep? 24x7 shifts for over a year? So you're cofounding a company, making horrible and unsustainable decisions as a leader to the point that you're probably sabotaging it and someone is giving you the platform to by proxy advise others to do the same?

How is someone supposed to come to a conclusion that such companies are successful in spite of and not because of such environments? What a backwards way to build an organization.

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In the extremely early days of a startup one doesn't have much optionality. With only three people at the company it really did not make any sense to hire a full time SRE for a pre PMF startup. I'm glad we made those trade offs back in 2011-2012 so that Firebase could be here today to be backed by a dedicated Google SRE team.

Obviously nobody can take away your contributions towards making Firebase successful. I think many people may not realize the kind of fanaticism that it takes to get a startup off the ground, considering the odds are stacked against you.

I am curious though, how well did you sleep that year?

Don't mince words. In the extremely early days of YOUR startup, YOU didn't FEEL like you had much optionality. That is in no way universal. You very much do have optionality. You can quantify how much it costs to hire someone part time or full-time. You can quantify the risks of burning yourself out, or your manager can. Your firm had the optionality, you just chose to go in a very specific direction.

What I'm saying is that your firm survived in spite of, not because of this frankly amateurish decision.

Agreed^2. Grab a highly qualified, talented person in India or Australia (or wherever is +12ish) from TopTal: solve the [first level] overnight issue, use them and onshore talent to drive the process of improving security and documentation while saving $$$, moving to supporting a global talent pool and improving the life of an offshore worker. Seems like a no-brainer to me (as long as the costs incurred are recaptured as benefits to the system/organization). Why would you tire and distract a _core_ contributor?

You cannot often outsource such things in a startup's early years. Things change fast, and a remote worker - does not matter how qualified - who is hired only for a specific purpose, especially something like SRE, might not have enough insight or context to fix things when they go wrong. It's fine to be idealistic and say that everything should be documented, communicated over email/Slack/hangouts whatever - but that does not work in practice when you are just focused on getting the product out, and dealing with multiple fires at the same time.

First of all, your words are saying outsource, not mine. I'm saying hire for. I'm saying specialize for, divide labor into. If you hire talented folks and understand how to divide labor properly (which you'll need to ever execute properly), you can do this from the get-go. I did this at my last seed-stage startup and I would have done it the same way every time.

People like talking about how things like this are idealistic, but what's more idealistic? Saying that you should hire the minimum amount of people to do the entire workload without taxing the finite biological constraints of the human body, or that you can't afford to do that and that somehow you will be the special person who can transcend your biological constraints without catastrophic failures?

If you ask me, the latter is what sounds idealistic. That's my criticism of this post.

>>First of all, your words are saying outsource, not mine

Maybe you have a different definition of outsource, then. For me, outsourcing is not necessarily sending work to a cheaper worker.

>>If you hire talented folks and understand how to divide labor properly Sure, but I don't think this is about division of labour. It's about communication, the small talk, all the things you have to hold in your head and cannot communicate because there's too many of it, and it's changing constantly.

I've worked in startups where it was thought possible to bring together a random group of people and get work done, and it failed miserably. I've also worked in startups where we did not do it, and went ahead to be successful. These are subjective experiences, but after almost two decades in software, I can humbly say I can see the patterns.

>>Saying that you should hire the minimum amount of people to do the entire workload without taxing the finite biological constraints of the human body

You should hire if you can, but it may not always work out if the person is remote and the role demands a lot of face to face interaction.

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