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Comment by candybar | Hacker News Reader

On the whole, this is a fairly good write-up but this is just not right:

> Being at a startup is hard in a way that is almost indescribable to anyone who hasn’t experienced it.

Being at a startup as an employee isn't necessarily hard. You hear this type of "startup is so hard" because running companies well is hard and successful startups will often grow faster than their founders are able to grow their own ability to run companies, which makes their own job challenging. And a lot of startups are poorly run in ways that are entirely avoidable (often as a result of their CEOs not being able to grow as quickly as their company) which can make life hard for the employees as well. But this isn't a necessary part of the startup experience.

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Startup work is much more chaotic than established companies. It is much closer to my creative experiences of directing a feature film and being in a touring band than it is to my time at big software companies. Instead of having clearly set requirements, you have to figure out the requirements as you go, and it's different and unique challenges every day.

Startup work isn't necessarily more chaotic than established companies. Assuming we're talking about tech companies, working at a big company doesn't mean you have "clearly set requirements" and working at a startup doesn't mean you don't have "clearly set requirements." You can have a well-defined role at a startup or a fluid role at a big company.

One very easy way to disprove this is by looking at the experience of startup employees after acquisition. Now the product is no longer offered by a startup, but by a big company. Do things get easier now that they are at established companies? Do you now have clear requirements?

Of course not - in many cases, things get drastically more difficult. Instead of being able to pursue a clear vision, you often have to deal with tons of inter-organizational politics. You have all these extra stakeholders that are trying to influence you, some with good intent, others not so much. More processes need to be imposed, there's more pressure for standardization/integration both in terms of the product features, implementation, not to mention processes.

And this is about apples to apples it gets.

Another way to think about this is that there's a reason why startups are successful despite the massive advantages incumbents and larger companies enjoy. It's because certain things are harder at bigger companies. Then how could it be that being at a startup is uniformly harder? Startups exist in large part because they are more efficient or make things easier. If you flip that around, it means trying to do some of those same things at a big established company can be objectively harder.

She clearly means from an executive point of view given the context. And having been an executive at two start-ups and one middle-sized company, I agree with her 100%.

Given the lack of details, my guess is that your role at those startups is wildly different from your role at the middle-sized company and also that these aren't necessarily comparable companies outside of size and age. 3 is also a stupidly small sample size for what it's worth.

You're moving the goalposts, but keep on digging I guess. I suppose your anecdotal and theoretical stories trump Tracy's lived ones and mine as well. No reason to continue this discussion.

I'm not moving the goalpost, you are. You're not the only one with lived experience and having had a job and founded a couple of companies doesn't allow you to generalize to come to the conclusion that:

> Being at a startup is hard in a way that is almost indescribable to anyone who hasn’t experienced it.

Because this simply isn't true. The point is also not that my experience trumps yours - the point is that this isn't generalizable and you're not comparing apples to apples.

Being at a startup doesn't have to be hard, at any level. And you and Tracy are certainly ascribing difficulties that arise from having responsibilities that are at times beyond your own capabilities and being extremely emotionally invested in the success of the company to being at a startup.

3 is greater than 0.

I'm not making a grandiose claim that being at a startup is indescribably hard. There are lots of hard jobs.

I've also had executive roles at startups, personally know tons of founders and tons of people that have worked in executive positions at startups and tons of other people that have worked in big tech companies, management consulting firms and investment banks, big law firms and so on. An executive role at a startup is simply not some type of outlier experience from a difficulty perspective. It all comes down to core competencies.

The issue here isn't that Tracy hired someone who doesn't have startup experience, but more that she hired someone who had been removed from day-to-day technical execution for decades, whose core competency at this point was dealing with bureaucratic complexity at a scale that simply didn't exist at her company and expected him to operate effectively at a level where you need to be significantly more hands-on.

This has nothing to do with startup vs big company. If you put this person as a line manager at a big tech company, it wouldn't go so well either. On the other hand, big tech L6/L7 type managers would be perfectly fine in these roles.

Not quite what I'm saying here but a similar perspective:

https://a16z.com/2010/04/21/why-is-it-hard-to-bring-big-comp...

Most non-startup jobs tend to be well-defined and come with a pre-existing business strategy and existing resources, such as a project codebase and existing at least semi-working solution to which one can inspect and add to.

Contrast this with startup companies, where it's often required to explore and build completely new things from the thin air of the ether. I'm not saying other jobs don't also have elements of this, as new projects and opportunities do emerge, but being at a startup is definitely an extreme situation and arguably a different game. In the meta lens, it can be viewed as the act of mining the veins of market realities for golden ideas.

It's for the risk takers and adventurers. I've witnessed many a great engineer learn it's too undefined which can be uncomfortable, and is not a good fit for them.

It's nothing personal, along the exact same lines as some folks who can't stand working for a large company.

Different strokes and all that. This form of diversity is one of the beautiful things about the spectrum of humanity. In aggregate, it works!

A lot of startups jobs are well-defined and have a pre-existing business strategy. In fact, in my experience, startups can even be much less fluid in this sense than big companies, because startups are funded for a much narrower mission based on a very specific vision, whereas big company often has a huge scope within which there's tons of ambiguity as to what to pursue.

A lot of these types of statements generally are made by founders whose relative role at the startup (C-level) is much senior than their past or would-be role at larger companies (entry-level or close). Or early employees who got to be much more senior within a startup than they had been at a larger company. This just isn't an accurate statement for the rank & file or when you compare people at similar levels across companies.

All good points, thanks for sharing the learnings of candybar.

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