 Vent: Life at a startup
Hey y'all.
I have been at this startup since November of last year, and I really have gone through all the emotions. The high of getting the offer, the excitement of meeting the <15 people in the entire company at a retreat, to the low of losing our designer and two engineers, and now being the last engineer standing.
I feel the pressure of having to perform, since I am expected to get things across that finish line. I'm looking at hand drawn scribbles from my founder that she expects me to somehow decipher into a redesign of one of our key components.
I feel the pressure of being expected to understand the context behind previous decisions, because if I can't understand those I cannot revamp them and make them better than before. I don't know what I don't know.
I feel the pressure of ambiguity and terrible planning, causing work that I have done to be obsolete only hours after completion and last minute change causing quick, half baked changes.
I just feel so stressed and unhappy with the company now.
I want to quit and put my time into looking for a new job. I have even though about reaching out to my previous manager to see if he'd consider giving me my old job back. I don't remember ever feeling this anxious at a non-startup, and am unsure if all start ups are like this or only mine because of the immature founder we have.
I don't really have anyone I can talk to about this stuff, so I thought I'd put it out here. Thanks for reading if you did.
I joined an early stage startup (first 5 people), and the month I joined both the CTO and the 1st eng hire left, leaving just me (reasons unrelated to me joining). Product was barely functioning, had to rebuild half the application the first 6 months; meanwhile the CEO was still selling the product and overpromising when we barely had a working base product. Eventually fixed the issues and then we then started to get traction and then grew the eng team back up to a sustainable level, and now recently raised a Series A (9 months after I joined and hit all the problems), then a Series B 4 months after that.
Sometimes the problems are worth persevering.
Although I don't know your background; mine was a mix of BigTech and one previous early stage startup, so I had a fairly good toolset of experiences to deal with the problems and to persevere but this was definitely the toughest part of my entire career either way. For a Junior/Mid level IC, or if you lack early stage experience, it can be tough to see the light at the end of the tunnel.
For me personally it did work out in the end though.
I wish you luck in your journey đ«