Leave your thoughts. How do you build an engineering team that stays together for decades when building early startups?

Was reading the Steve Jobs book recently and realized he probably wasn't the easiest to work with / definitely did not create a great culture around him, especially in the early Apple years. Remembered the movie on blackberry that I saw couple weeks ago and how it was this crazy, hard-ass ceo took charge and actually turned the company around, otherwise Blackberry would be nowhere in our memories today. Do you think this is what is actually needed to build successful companies early on - and employee wellbeing and culture are things to be solved for later in the journey of a company?

As title says

I am working on a product(more or less thinking about it). I need to build a team of designer(s), tech folk(s) and a lot more. The issue being ₹₹₹. How do you build teams that work on having an equity share and have an understanding of shared ownership? Where/How do I identify such people?

I see so many folks complaining about status quo around where they work. Very curious to understand what are your expectations from a startup and the founders. This may help us get what we want from startup founders here. In the comment, highlight what you want and what you're willing to give.

I am starting up soon. I care about working on meaningful problems, with good people and building the right culture. Have been hearing from a lot of folks about culture problems in startups. Seems more of a norm rather than an exception. Curious to know why do startup culture degrade? What pitfalls should I avoid to create a healthy culture?

I am a 6 yrs experienced Software developer and part of a mid-stage startup. This is my third job; I have been working here for 3 years. I was involved here as one of the core engineers at the start in developing the overall platform, After that, my growth as an engineer stagnated for 2 years . Constant importance and priority are given to business requirements and hacky work getting pushed to production in the name of fast iterations and business impact every week. My engineering manager lacks proper engineering skills and doesn't respect engineers even after their impact on the company and constantly keeps saying the engineering team doesn't contribute to the revenue of the company despite us pushing work that improves business positively. Last year around November, around 80% of the engineering team was subtly suggested to start looking out for work (basically a soft layoff) because management was too scared of a social media backlash Due to all this,2 years' worth of technical debt has accumulated on the overall codebase and apart from giving justification for every code improvement that we try to make there, we still have to work on business/product requirements. My growth as an engineer has stopped and I am worried about missing out on the latest developments in the tech industry, especially with AI in the picture, and want to make my skillset somewhat AI-proof. I have come back to hands-on coding this year , so that's a positive start. I am considering taking a 3-4 month break after resigning from my company to study, develop side projects, develop a portfolio etc Has anyone else been in this boat ? How did you come out strong?

Question came up because it’s Independence Day 🇮🇳 A lot of us have had the privilege to be able to go abroad, but ended up choosing not to. For me, it was just believing there’s enough growth here in the coming few decades + friends/family Looking to hear if the reduced brain drain is actually true, and what makes people stay.

Hey guys! So an early career professional here. Currently, have around 6 month of work experience as a frontend dev in an early stage startup. I have been coding decently here, worked on features, customer bugs etc. but the work has started to feel quite repetitive and the workplace also feels like a feature factory now. I have two questions. a) what actionable things can I actually do to work on some new or interesting stuff b) has the experience been the same for you folks or are there any places in India where you actually learn and grow a lot as an engineer and not end up just endlessly shipping features

I'm a designer working at a early stage product startup. Our product team is of 5 Devs/ Engineers & 3 Designers (including me). We have created roadmaps, followed sprints, tracked but they were never efficient as there were lot of ad hock high priority tasks we needed to take. I couldn't find any helpful resources specific to the situation. Could you please share any articles / resources / give me a right direction on this.

When the recruiter or HM opens up for questions, are you inclined towards asking them tough questions related to the organisation? Lately I've started asking: - How were people who were impacted in the latest lay-offs decided? - Do you believe the team is at risk of lay-offs? In the overall org, where would you place this team in terms of business criticality. - In case of downsizing how will you ensure that your team is going to be least impacted. - Questions on talent being fungible, coding practices, knowledge organisation and sharing (hoarding/individual level, team level, org level) - How does the manager ensure equity in workloads (especially useful for startups). - Team agreements like stand-up timings, in-out timings, and most importantly, how often were these changed in the last 6m-1y. Folks, feel free to add to the list! Would love to hear your thoughts. Managers are supposed to manage teams and be technically competent. Everyone is a champ when times are easy. The true colors are shown only when the going gets tough. Most of the answers are gonna be template/standardizations. The key is to read between the lines. If the manager is clueless or the body language doesn't inspire any confidence, then it's a red flag.