This comes from an anonymous programmer applicant, who had the following assessment of my last posting about working at a startup:

“I had in fact already read your blog on startup environment. I have not experienced a work setting of precisely this nature, except possibly as an EMT on scene. “

Oh yeah, and anothing thing!  Have you checked out bonanzle.com lately?  It’s looking like the programmer finally got some help with design…

Progress continues to lurch forward in fits and starts as we settle on the personnel configuration to lead us to launch. Having watched a handful of similar revelations occur to many of our previous team members, it has dawned on me that the same factors that make Bonanzle so exhilarating for me are the factors that cause others to turn tail and head for the highway. My conclusion is that, until you’ve experienced the atmosphere before, it is easy to over- or under- estimate how difficult it is to be a part of creating something big from scratch. As usual, Paul Graham has insightful observations on the topic, but reading his poetic account of “hard work” makes it sound more romantic than I think it is. For my time, and the time of our future potential applicants, I think it is vital to accurately describe the most important differences between the startup and non-startup company.

I don’t think that work at a startup is most accurately described as “harder” than work at a large company. One of the “hardest” jobs I ever had was keeping my brain busy while I did nothing for 8 hours a day as a web programmer at the University Bookstore. A better point of comparison between small and large company is the degree of chaos and compromise you experience on a daily basis.

Specifically, these here are my five biggest contrasts that I think startle people who haven’t been immersed in a startup before:

1. The roadmap is drawn as you go. Well, technically, the roadmap is drawn at the beginning, but the more time gets spent drawing that original roadmap, the more time was wasted when that everything-you-know-is-wrong moment happens. Startups are about doing, not speculating.
2. Despite the best intentions, things will be broken. Sometimes with no easy solutions. And it will take creativity to work around it.
3. You are beholden to deadlines. No matter what excellent new service pack is available; no matter what important features from the next milestone one would rather work on. Of course, sometimes that excellent service pack absolutely does need to be installed, so you have to figure out the relative degree of necessity.
4. You are beholden to deadlines. Items only get checked off the schedule if each and every team member is 100% productive with their time. Working at Microsoft it might well be weeks before somebody notices you’ve been spinning your wheels over a certain problem. At a startup, spinning your wheels for 3 days will show up on the schedule.
5. You are your manager. And you are your everything else. Even in a company that attempts to create specialized roles, there usually isn’t time to send an email to the manager to get a task clarified, then get ahold of your web designer to create HTML, before finally working on the original bug that had been assigned to you. Instead, each person must often use their confidence (and common sense) to guide them to a sensible solution when a task has not been well-defined (see also item #1).

Look down the list, and there it is: compromise, chaos, compromise, chaos, chaos. Is it intrinsically harder to deal with chaos and compromise than a lack thereof? I doubt it. But it does take a special personality to have the confidence, patience, and foresight to see how the decisions they make on an everyday basis might seem like chaos, but when the dust settles, suddenly something amazing stands where moments ago there was nothing.

That is the payoff that awaits those with the grit to make something big happen.

Who would have thought?  Some 5 years after Google emerged in the public consciousness, and they have done their first kind-of-evil thing.  When I logged into my Gmail this morning, there was a big, red stripe across the top of my Gmail account warning me that if I didn’t disable Firebug (web debugging software used by 99% of all web developers, 100% of all web developers in their right mind), than there could be severe performance penalties while I used Gmail.

I will admit that I was pretty disappointed that Google chose to try to make users change their habits, rather than taking the extra time (and yes, cost) to get Gmail to work with a tool so common amongst web developers.  But at the same time, it made me re-realize just how seldom Google chooses to take the low road like this.  In the pre-Google days, it was routine for applications to make me reboot my computer to install them.  Or for applications to not include an uninstaller.  And include spyware.  And pester me with waits to use them if I didn’t pay.

Of course, many applications still do these things, and I don’t think that Google alone has turned the tide away from these annoying practices, but it has certainly risen public awareness that “don’t be evil” is a viable business strategy that can create both adoring users and a profitable bottom line.  Katy recently pointed out that it should only be a matter of time until Starbucks’ insistence on charging users $6.00/hour to use the Internet could come back to hurt them.  I hope she’s right.  There is no need for these kinds of business practices, when righteous users now know to stand up to them.