Its a shame most of the comments on this seem to be reddit quality. Almost as if the people making them have never been in this situation.
I think the problem is, anyone that's worked in the startup world for a while has been in this situation. But most of them have seen it from the other side.
Where you've got maybe 2% equity in a company if you're lucky, and a salary that's about half what you'd be making flipping Java-burgers at a bank. Where you, the sysadmin-at-large (amongst other hats that you wear) see first-hand that traffic levels are a couple orders of magnitude less than you were supposed to set up the system to scale to. Where you're asked to put in 55 hours this week instead of the usual "lazy" 50 because the killer hail-mary-feature that's going to save the company (and is suspiciously similar re: customer visibility to the killer hail-mary-feature of last week) has to be pushed out by Monday or else, ...what, all 20 of the people that bothered to sign up to the mailing list will be disappointed at the missed deadline...? Blech.
Sure, sometimes the situation is different, sometimes it really is a matter of a few people with equal stakes in the outcome not equally pulling weight, and that can be a real problem worth worrying about. But I'm always skeptical when I see CEOs complaining about lazy drones, quite often these complaints are more indicative of top-down scope-creep, bad time estimates, or a failing business model than any actual problem with the workers.
I think the problem is, anyone that's worked in the startup world for a while has been in this situation. But most of them have seen it from the other side.
Where you've got maybe 2% equity in a company if you're lucky, and a salary that's about half what you'd be making flipping Java-burgers at a bank. Where you, the sysadmin-at-large (amongst other hats that you wear) see first-hand that traffic levels are a couple orders of magnitude less than you were supposed to set up the system to scale to. Where you're asked to put in 55 hours this week instead of the usual "lazy" 50 because the killer hail-mary-feature that's going to save the company (and is suspiciously similar re: customer visibility to the killer hail-mary-feature of last week) has to be pushed out by Monday or else, ...what, all 20 of the people that bothered to sign up to the mailing list will be disappointed at the missed deadline...? Blech.
Sure, sometimes the situation is different, sometimes it really is a matter of a few people with equal stakes in the outcome not equally pulling weight, and that can be a real problem worth worrying about. But I'm always skeptical when I see CEOs complaining about lazy drones, quite often these complaints are more indicative of top-down scope-creep, bad time estimates, or a failing business model than any actual problem with the workers.