Once upon a time i started working for a startup which in hindsight turned into one of the worst moments of my development career. While it certainly wasn’t all bad, it didn’t live up to expectations.

Before all of this, i thought working in a startup was quite a cool concept. Developers at the start have the power to be instrumental in developing the business and its products, so in a way it sounded like the ultimate creative effort. That combined with the potential of “The big buyout” was very attractive proposition.

Before i joined, i debated the options. Being cautious i didn’t want to go full-blown into the business, so instead i telecommuted as a freelancer with my other existing commitments.
In hindsight this was the best decision i ever made.

At first the working environment was great. I was tasked with implementing some rather cool features into the main product, working with fairly interesting people, some of whom were instrumental in improving the product.
Although i technically didn’t have any obligation to work flat out at times, i did so under the guise of making a difference.

As time went on, i ended up visiting their offices. But it was nothing like i had expected: instead of a “warm buzz” of a startup i instead found more of an awkward cold silence. Perhaps this was the first warning something wasn’t quite right.

Around this time i noticed operations were commonly micro-managed and interrupt-driven, which was ok unless you wanted to get anything done. There always seemed to be a crisis that needed resolving, so i was always on edge.

Besides that, all seemed fine until the next major iteration of the product when development focus changed.

The new focus? Crunch on getting the new release out. Ignore everything else you are doing, no excuses. I developed the dreaded “Tunnel Vision” and relentlessly worked. After all, if i wasn’t doing something, what was i there for?

As the focus on features dwindled, my main role gradually turned into the bug fixer, which from what i can tell was another way of saying “we don’t appreciate you anymore.”

The biggest demotivation came as the team decided to completely rewrite the next version using the next big thing. This effectively meant everything i had worked on and worried about for the past year had amounted to nothing.

As the startup grew, weekly meetings were introduced as a means to improve communication and determine who was working on what, which besides wasting time constantly reminded me how boring and mundane my work had become.

By this time I was suffering increasingly from stress and burnout from dealing with the startup and other commitments to make things work out.
You could probably have measured my productivity by the amount of lolcats and memes i posted into the company chatroom as a means of coping.

Eventually, things got so worse i had to take a break.

Several months later, i had a hard think: did i really want to continue working in this fashion?
The answer was no. I decided to leave for good.

Safe to say in the space of 2 years my illusion of startups being cool, fun companies to work with had been shattered.

I will probably never work for a startup ever again.