Hacker News Reader

Comment by Centigonal | Hacker News Reader

FWIW, here's another post/memo from the same person. He's laser-focused on developing a competitive advantage and severely discounts the value of employee experience. If you don't share the same priors, you might find his arguments less convincing.

https://flocrivello.com/ux-ex-the-painful-truth-about-custom...

Even more context is that his previous startup focuses on creating software for remote sales teams - so this guy should know more about how remote teams work than many.

Personally, as someone who's part of a remote pre-PMF team, I feel that remote work makes it somewhat harder for us all to be in sync, build together, and feel a sense of focus. That said, I assign a non-zero value on not having to sell my stuff, leave my friends and family, and move to the other side of the country.

View on HN

I work in a couple of small teams for a few companies. I have a full time gig and a few part time ones. All the teams are remote, and many are in different timezones and varying a lot, even with language sometimes. In some cases the entire company works remote, from HR to sales to dev.

I don't get the communication issues, nor do I get the project planning issues. Some of the companies are established while others are new, some are one product, others are many.

We have regular catchups, some of the teams I work with even meet in person occasionally.

I think though in the post the 2 bits which stand out to me is the VC reason, but also having a small team and not being able to align them.

I am going to make the judgement that small means less than 10, it is hard to manage teams but it's not that difficult. Teams are not hive minds, and if you cannot align a small team of people who probably spend the majority of their time working individual, then there is something else missing.

He makes an incredibly weak argument here. Even if it is true that UX > EX (users experience more important than employee experience) you don't have to trade-off between them until and unless you are at the Pareto frontier. It's almost always true that you are not Pareto efficient, and that means you can improve UX with out hurting EX or improve EX without hurting UX, and I would wager in almost all teams and all companies in the world there is plenty of room to improve both at the same time.

I totally agree! Furthermore, chasing better employee experience can drive wins for customers, because chasing UX over EX would lead us to a very fragile, risk-prone world with few long-term efficiency improvements (short term EX is often long-term UX).

Things like DevOps ("why spend time making internal tools for maintaining infrastructure when we could manage it by hand?") and data engineering ("in the time it takes you to replace our manual Excel process with Python, we could have come up with 3 new insights for our stakeholders!") rarely prosper in situations where EX is totally discounted - even though they end up paying big dividends for the business in the long run.

Most importantly, employees are human, and dejected employees won't do their best work for you. I agree that the best place to be is somewhere on the pareto frontier, and most startup CEOs are fooling themselves if they think they're already there.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com