This is a good example of why you should always send your content over the wire.
As a dozen people have noticed, this article is unreadable. But it doesn't have to be. The piece coming from venturebeat.com is transferring fine. But the CDN hosting their css and jQuery is down, and they've built their site using that baffling pattern of loading nothing but an empty shell, then populating it later.
So we get the name of their "chief reliability officer" and a bunch of links to other articles that we won't be able to read, but no article.
Now suppose they had built their site like we used to build sites, and actually sent the 760 bytes of content that make up the text of the article as part of that shell. I know, I know. We'd have to download that entire 3kb html page every single pageload (before then downloading four megabytes of sidebar nonesense). And think of the extra engineering time they'd need to spend so that they could not only send that article at load time, but also use their (presumably) fancy article-changing mechanism that we were so near to seeing today.
But at least then people would be able to read things on their website.
We'd have one comment at the bottom asking if anybody else had seen the borked CSS. But that would have been drowned out by people who were happy enough to read the text in Times Roman actually discussing its content.
I'm working at a startup right now, and I think this is pretty accurate.
The freedom is nice (no hours, nobody telling exactly what to do every day). However, I will NEVER be able to have the passion for the product as I would if it was my own startup, this is just work to me.
The rewards game for first employees is perplexing. You have an order of magnitude less incentive than the founders who birthed the thing. Arguably, that's taken care of: you're on a real salary while they're making peanuts. You're also capable of moving to a new job tomorrow, while this is the founders' life.
But when an acquihire with retention bonus is almost equivalent in net payout to you as a successful acquisition or IPO might be, it is difficult to be super-invested instead of merely daydreaming and working toward starting your own company. At best you can hope to be flush from a quick and healthy payout, which might pay off student loans or capitalize the first steps of your own risky venture.
Is the game of Silicon Valley just to structurally encourage everyone to eventually devote their time to fully creating their own pet technologies and products? Who works for anyone else except for fools and transients?
I haven't had a chance to read the article yet, as venturebeat seems to be down, however to your last point -
I feel like to some extent, yes - and I sort of doubt it's a good thing. One of the founders where I work actually asked me why I hadn't tried to start my own company. In truth, there's a myriad of reasons. What stuck in my head though, is that - if anyone with a modicum of talent is viewed as slacking for not starting their own thing, then who are we left with to actually work for and help develop the companies that DO get started?
Given this current culture (at least, how I perceive it) - I feel as if it's leading to many companies that, though they may end up getting bought and putting a nice chunk of change in its founders' and investors' pockets, they're really not making important break throughs, and will eventually be forgotten. Whereas, if getting a company off the ground were substantially harder, the ones that did make it off the ground floor would need more people, be working on bigger problems, and ultimately more progress would be made.
Great article. This explains succinctly why you never should work at a start-up. Just don't. Let the 'founders' do the work, that's why they're founders.
I think they mean startups that are in a later stage than what you are thinking (funded and growing). It's not like the founders are going to be the only employees for the life of the company.
As a dozen people have noticed, this article is unreadable. But it doesn't have to be. The piece coming from venturebeat.com is transferring fine. But the CDN hosting their css and jQuery is down, and they've built their site using that baffling pattern of loading nothing but an empty shell, then populating it later.
So we get the name of their "chief reliability officer" and a bunch of links to other articles that we won't be able to read, but no article.
Now suppose they had built their site like we used to build sites, and actually sent the 760 bytes of content that make up the text of the article as part of that shell. I know, I know. We'd have to download that entire 3kb html page every single pageload (before then downloading four megabytes of sidebar nonesense). And think of the extra engineering time they'd need to spend so that they could not only send that article at load time, but also use their (presumably) fancy article-changing mechanism that we were so near to seeing today.
But at least then people would be able to read things on their website.
We'd have one comment at the bottom asking if anybody else had seen the borked CSS. But that would have been drowned out by people who were happy enough to read the text in Times Roman actually discussing its content.