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Comment by dyeje | Hacker News Reader

Have you considered that maybe your work style is not suited to startups? It sounds like you are very methodical, which is great, but startups are default dead when they don't have a money generating product and scrappiness is needed to get something out the door. If I were your boss and I found out you were spending time on meticulous issue tracking that no one was reading, I would frankly be very upset.

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Thank you for your reply. You might be right about that. I worked in academia before and I absolutely loved it. Maybe that's the style of work for me.

In my defense, I think that was a special case. This was a product to be certified as a medical device. Regulations require keeping records of all changes to the code that can be linked to well-defined "software requirements" and "stakeholder requirements". This can be done in a complex spreadsheet or by linking issues/merge requests in a certain way. I chose the issues. Also, as the product might affect health outcomes, I felt responsibility to make the product as solid and maintainable as possible.

> Regulations require keeping records

Who decided to be compliant at this stage of the company, you or whoever is in charge of business operations?

> I felt responsibility to make the product as solid and maintainable as possible

Was this responsibility conveyed to you or did you make this decision on your own?

I'm clearly making an assumption here, but this reads like a case where both sides had a misunderstanding about how engineering time is spend. They trusted you with some autonomy to get things off the ground and found out you are making business decisions on your own that don't fit into resource constrained startup operations. There is always a trade-off and corners can be cut, and my advice is to be upfront about the general approach about those and find out how much they are willing to invest in robustness and product quality at a certain stage.

>Who decided to be compliant at this stage of the company, you or whoever is in charge of business operations?

Medical regulations often pierce the corporate veil and create personal liability for the developer/whoever. He may not have had a choice. If you're asking your employees to commit crimes, expect high turnover.

> You might be right

> In my defense

Reading through your story and comments, this seems to be your main problem. Better communication might be helpful but you have to be more open to feedback and criticism. At the risk of sounding rude (not my goal) this post reads like a plea for validation. I don't know you and I hope I'm wrong, just going on what I see here.

A startup company to independently develop a medical product with a novel operating principle to be certified is a certifiable distinguished subgroup of complete morons. You don’t have to feel sorry for being misunderstood by those people.

Conversely, if I were an employee spending time on meticulous issue tracking that no one was reading, and I found out my boss was very upset about that, I would be questioning why my boss only realized what I was doing when it got to the point of upsetting them so much, and I may be a little upset about them wasting my time for so long.

Seems to me like OP had an absentee boss who ultimately threw them under the proverbial bus.

He's skipping company meetings and minimizing one on one communication, it doesn't sound like his boss is the absentee one

While I was in a single-person department, I used a Jira project where I put my tasks and commented clearly about progress. Then I realized that I was the only one using it. Neither my boss nor anybody else cared whether the information was in Jira, a spreadsheet, a Word doc, or if I just verbally explained what I had done.

So I stopped tracking things meticulously in Jira and only kept basic notes of what I had done. Worked out fine.

I'd give them a raise for being low maintenance & self managing.

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