Frustrated with my Startup

I'm surprised to see on the comment section that people actually support this load of crap. To any newbies or freshers entering tech this year, don't follow this advice. These CEOs exploit your time to gain revenue and when the time is not good they wouldn't think twice before considering layoffs. Just do your job and go home to your life and family. This advice only applies to entrepreneurs who have huge stakes in the company. Because if the company do well they get millions in returns as dividends. As an employee, even if you work for 25 hours you only get the same salary. Don't follow any so called self procalimed entrepreneurs advocating for the hustle culture. You hustle for your life, not for your boss or your job.

4yoe Engineer turned Product Manager. It's been 8 months I joined this B2B SaaS startup as an APM. Engineering team... mostly interns. Most of my time goes into execution following up with devs. Is the PR reviewed, is the bug fix deployed. No Jira, scrum, sprint planning whatsoever. CEO runs the whole show. Only fear driven product management. I have no idea what it means to work on vision or strategy. My career has started off with a shitty foundation. Everyday I feel like quitting. What should I do? Quit right away or wait n switch to a better company?

IIT grad here building a venture backed startup. I think 99% of folks here believe that venture backed founders are super entitled and in a much "cosier" position than employees Just sharing a few facts about our journey so far if it helps anyone improve their perspectives- 1) Paying ourselves 33% of our campus salary & 60% of what we are paying to our employees (Talking about Pure Base Salary here, not including ESOPs) 2) Insane stress - You basically have to raise money to build (esp if its deeptech because of the high fixed costs) and there are predefined metrics you have to always chase, sometimes just beyond yourselves. Your product will be copied if it's good because well, they always have more money than you. You work 7 days a week for insane hours, chasing metrics required to be "afloat" 3) 99% of venture backed startups result in 0 liquidity gain for founders. So basically in all likeliness, everything is for a net negative return compared to if we took the campus job So, when you wholeheartedly bash founders as if they are sitting On a goldmine while you are toiling for THEIR gold Treasure, just understand that more likely than not, there is not really any gold but rather an irrational hope they are clinging to Also, Yes-we pay above market to our employees (100% hike for the last one) but the truth is some startups just Can't afford it. And ironically, there is a much higher looking down on these startups with meagurely paid founders rather than giants like Tech Mahindra paying peanuts to their employees while having a 1000% salary hike for the executives. Yeah, most startups need to do better but please appreciate if someone is atleast trying to do better because trust me, it's INSANELY HARD.. The number of posts I see about Flipkart making hundreds millionaires is way too less than the ones I see about pinpointing at every single mistake early stage startups do & I just wanted to express my opinion on it Peace!

I'm seeing so many posts where startup employees are cribbing about things like layoffs, work culture etc etc. Doesn't seem like they have perspective on everything it takes to build a startup. I've built a failed startup myself and have immense respect for founders who are grinding it out there in such difficult recessionary circumstances. And then you have so many of the engineers and PMs cribbing about basics without talking about important things like learning growth, building for the future etc. Why such myopia? I work at a big tech and envy the speed at which startups move, the big responsibility everyone gets to handle, the fast career growth. All these things are being cribbed about. They crib about founders wanting more. Their job is to ensure success, not to give lifetime jobs to entitled people. They have more headaches you can imagine. In my small startup I had a million headaches. I can only imagine how hard it must be to run larger ships. Is everyone joining a startup these days looking for a get rich quick scheme?

I joined a startup a couple months ago and I get the feeling that everything is so..slow? These guys take months to get clarity on a single feature, and that too, not completely. Engineering team is extremely slow. Nobody is proactive which has started making me feel weird. They've been at it on a single platform capability for 4 months now and there are things that are still not clear. Plus my KT didn't happen so most of the time I'm trying to put 2 and 2 together. All of this has started making me feel so insecure. I spoke to other people in the team and they were like one of my projects has been going on for years. Any advice on how to tackle it? I'm trying to see if I can switch since this is not the kind of team and fundamentals I want to work with

Been working with a pre series A level startup for about 3 years being my first job. Paid about 20-25lpa for a full stack role. Engineering + product team is still single digit strength as we are not pureplay tech company. Had a great learning because of a good manager and 0-1 kind of work we did but I am starting to feel stagnated because of following reasons 1. We don't have anything like SDE1, 2 etc because there are very few devs. 1 manager and everyone else is an SDE. The company doesn't intend to hire more for at least an year.. so i won't see any title level promotion or any role that feels senior despite being around for a while 2. Salary. Want to know if I am behind the standard pay because i belong to tier 1.5ish college. Big tech seems to pay more for 3yrs workex as usually people become sde2 by then

The current startup tech employees and founders are filled with so much junkies who do not care about the product at all. The culture is set when the startup is founded,when the first set of employees arrive. These folks are some of the most driven and talented and that's fine, it's how it should be. But the problem begins when these folks do not find their own hiring strategy and copy the hiring strategy of other companies. Instead of analysing what works best for them they justify their hiring means by saying this is what other have done. The result is you get a bunch of leetcode warriors who are always wanting to jump ships when given opportunity, never forming deep knowledge about their industry and their product. I work in one of the legacy tech companies, sure we do not hire the best people but we nurture them and that earns loyalty and long careers in our company. Even the employees have a very 360 degree view wrt product. We always deeply care about our product. Tbh I love seeing the stupidity of the market and it makes me happy that more confident that these people are wrong and always will be. Even the Indian startups are unoriginal and copied from the west then how do you expect the hiring to be unique. We are all living in the circus where jokers are supporting each other in making the circus bigger.

So i joined this mature startup 10 months back, and my role as per JD was team leader. Till date I am doing the IC role and doing all day sales calls. I have highlighted the same to my manager and skip level, but always getting answer like it is new product, market situation is no good, we believe in lean structure etc. I am tired of doing same shit everyday. What’s your suggestion?

Hi everyone, I joined a startup back in May which started in May itself. I wrote the first line of code and it has been the backend work since then and have hired a few interns along the way. I took some pay cut to join this startup and i didn't receive any share/ESOPs as well in my offer letter. but whenever i talk to my friends who have worked or are working in these types of companies, ask me to ask for the ESOPs/equity from my founder. I did talk about equity/ESOPs before accepting my offer letter but that time, they said, you will be issued ESOPs later on when we raise some funding. We will make some ESOPs plan when we raise funding. I know that our company has only raised friends and family round of amount near to 1cr. Now I need advice on.. should i bring up this conversation again with the company's founder ? And how much percentage of equity should I be asking..? given that I am giving my 101% daily and leading the backend team.. although i have industry experience of only 3 years but have good academic achievements and has completed graduation in computer science in tier-1 college.

So I am working at a startup for around a year now. Everyday I see, it feels, what am I really doing? Where is the life headed? Doing bare minimum or doing your tasks and fucking off isn't enough. It's expected that we outgrow constantly, as if it's this work that we can always think about and nothing else. At the end, am wondering if it's still worth it? 1 day it feels that let's just quit it! Next day I feel, okay, I do want the money. I ain't looking for suggestions here, just wanted to see if anyone else felt this way