Ask HN: How do I leave a startup on philosophical grounds?
I have been working for a startup here in beautiful San Francisco for a little while now as a programmer and mathematician, I was drawn to the startup because I thought the idea was valuable and wanted to be a part of something that was going to impact a lot of people's lives, in addition, one of the founders has a considerable social media presence that I thought would be able to bring us to new heights. I was also the first technical hire and was excited to be applying a lot of statistics and machine learning theory to my job as well as shaping the technical future of the company. Only one catch - I would be paid nothing until the company went through Round A financing, which was said at the time I was brought on to be closing, at the latest, the first week of October.
I started out by working on an machine learning algorithm for automatically parsing and constructing tweets, under the guise that we would be targeting people who were obviously interested in the services our startup offered. Using a structured learning approach (and thorough application of k-means :), the accuracy and ability of the program to mass-message interested parties grew exponentially, I noticed potential for abuse, and I talked to a casual friend at twitter to verify this was OK - indeed it was as long as it didn't get out of hand, ever confident in my ability to 'keep things from getting out of hand'. As time grew on, the CEO of the company pressured me into using it to the ends of spamming people and (effictively) asking me get around twitter's spam detection algorithms and in general make twitter a worse place to be. I voiced objections and the CEO of the company basically told me I was naive and that everyone in the space was doing this.
As time went on, the work environment became more stressful, despite the fact that I had only committed to evenings 3 days a week, I came in a few extra times during the past weeks in order to meet some deadlines for the site. When I took a day off (In reality, not a day off, it was a day I was slated to have off), the CEO of the company was very upset with me because I had given her 'the impression' that I would be working all the time from there on out.
I should also reiterate at this point that I'm the only technical employee, but not the only employee. We have a 'community manager', 'Product Manager', 'CFO' and a number of writers. I should note that our startup has nothing to do with writing, and is actually in the social discovery space. I don't feel this is an optimum organization for a company, but I haven't said anything about it.
One night, the CEO and CFO of the company wanted to make a Gantt chart of our progress, we went through various development scenarios (Rather, what various non-programmer's impression of how development works scenarios), and I was continually asked how long certain events ranging from how long it would take to "warm up" our MCMC algorithm in the site's recommendation engine to how long certain programming tasks would take. Unfortunately I didn't have a whole lot of solid data at the time, so I told them the only thing I knew - "I'm sorry, I don't have a way of making a good estimate". After two or three times, the CEO was visibly irritated that I couldn't tell how long it would take and we decided to break.
The next day the CEO brought me into a conference room and told me I was being uncooperative, I was a little taken aback by this but I asked her to explain. She was concerned that I wasn't working full-time (I've deceived the reader a bit here, because full-time implies you're being paid), even though I had worked just one week full-time, out of the kindness of my heart in order to meet deadlines. She continued to explain that my philosophical objections to some things that were happening in the company were only slowing us down and weren't productive, as well as the fact that "As an engineer, you know how to do math and computers, on't tell me how to do my job", this tidbit referenced a suggestion that our site's "metrics" that were being reported to me were flawed, and that I could prove it with statistics, unfortunately my argument based on principle component analysis and cross validation fell on deaf ears (I'll let you guess who was right, a Berkeley design graduate or Thomas Bayes).
After this, I felt it was imperative that I look for a new position, but to be frank I'm a little bit intimidated by interviewing processes, as well I'm very young without a university degree. I hack on NoSQL database internals for my open source project (A granular riak derivative) and am very active in Machine Learning research and have authored a number of scripts, tools and speak at some ML meetups in the area. Despite all of this, I'm somewhat embarrassed to say I'm intimidated of interviewing at startups, so I resigned myself to my fate and slogged on with the hopes that it would get better or maybe the funding would come through someday.
Our prior site was designed and coded by an Indian firm, and it soon became clear I would redo all of it. I was excited by the opportunity to do some 'real work' rather than running a marketing shell game, and despite an extremely aggressive timeline, I was and am working night and day to get it out the door.
Later down the line, things changed, a few people were reading some pull requests I had made on Github and contacted me about beginning work immediately on a recommendation engine. In addition, a startup I had done contract work for when I first moved to SF (They had just lost their entire Rails team and were already in deep trouble with investors at the time) was able to secure funding based on the product I wrote for them, the CEO saw me in the hallways and insisted to take me out to lunch, and said "*, we are incredibly impressed with your programming ability, we couldn't have launched our startup without you, you are literally our godsend" and proceeded to give me 1k out of thanks for my effort and extended a more permanent offer to me. I know thats not the dolla dolla bills that we're all searching for, but in my situation it made a huge difference and indicates to me that there is a great disparity in the compassion of people involved in startups.
So here I find myself, working extremely hard, all weekend, all last week, and the week before that on this project. I'm blowing off people who are trying to pay me good money and people who I really enjoy speaking with so I can work on this project for which I'm likely to see nothing. It's really my own insecurities about being seen as someone who just backs out. Now I'm sitting in the darkness of my office working on new feature requests as the pour in, about 10 of them came in on pivotal yesterday, they are all "supposed" to be done tomorrow, so that the CEO can show off the product.
So I'm thinking about quitting (Can you quit a job you don't get paid for?), and theres where it gets tricky.
The CEO has a considerable social media following and is a good networker (Which is why I came to work for her in the first place), she's a nice lady and I'm on great terms with everyone I work with. However, I am the only engineer and I don't know if she really has a whole lot of options outside of me, my departure may be relatively devastating to the startup and the fine people that work there at this stage and would be almost entirely without warning, I'm trying to finish up the product she wanted just so she can have SOMETHING to work with and not just be left out in the e-cold but I'm concerned that leaving the company at this point will forever put the mark of the beast upon my forehead. In addition, the company I worked for previously is in the same incubator and it would be really awkward if I left. On top of all of this, I want to let the CEO know that I'm leaving not because I'm not passionate about the product (I am), not because I don't like the people or her, or even the money -- but because frankly this is not an appropriate way to treat an employee and that its not right to act with condescension because someone is younger than you or is "An engineer", instilling these finer philosophical points is assured to only inflame her temper I'm sure.
I've never asked for e-help before, so I implore you for your advice Hacker News, what's a young man like me to do in this situation? Are you hiring?