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Comment by mak4athp | Hacker News Reader

> You have to inspire people to work hard, long and sometimes grueling hours to deliver.

You're doing it wrong. If you're having that much trouble with deadlines and bandwidth, you should be inspiring your CEO, board, and investors to solve that problem. You should also make sure that you're providing them with honest estimates and not over-promising what your team can achieve.

Even if they do it willingly, pressing so hard on your team is going to lead to burnout and turnover in the long term, and lower quality deliverables in the medium term. Those almost certainly cost your startup more than a postponed feature or missed deadline.

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I don't disagree with most of what you said. But the reality is there will be long grueling hours regardless of the best laid plans. So you have to inspire people to push through that. That doesn't mean you aren't pushing back on deadlines and working smarter, but when you have limited runway you have to push hard. It also doesn't mean you abuse people or not push them to take personal time.

As for inspiring the board and CEO etc. totally agree, but rarely is there a time an early startup CTO can tell investors we need to move slower. The best scenario generally is working to get more resources to reduce individual workloads but you still have to inspire people to work hard which will result in a number of long hours for some. And you can't be the "manager" just telling people to work harder, they have to be inspired by the work and what they are doing.

I also think it is critical to know how to transition your team to a more mature group as you raise further money and gain clients and revenue. Exactly to your point.

I'm not sure if I can agree with that. In my 10 years of development, I encountered only one company whose tech side had to work under such conditions.

Any other time, it was a rarity, maybe like 3-4 days a year in case of emergencies. And this includes CTOs.

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