I kept pushing for my vision, which would have taken a bit of patience, but the shareholders kept pushing for faster returns within unreasonable time frames. The other founder was CEO at the time and he didn’t dare resist the shareholders impatience.

The other founder kept changing the company strategy after pretty much every prospect he talked with, because he wanted to make a faster return, which, against my constant back-pressure to get stuff properly done, made us move in all directions without ever really committing to a single strategy or even properly finishing work. We had a period of fast growth for a while, mostly due to a smart sales strategy and a slick story (based on my vision), but then all the unfinished loose ends kept creeping back and we lost a lot of customers to quality issues and an inability to deliver on our promises. Every customer wanted something else and since we were building a platform we could in theory do everything, but in practice we had only a certain amount of developers, so we just couldn’t make them all happy. There was also a real pressure from sales to make prospects and POCs work, but there was very little pressure to make actual production systems produce value, so it seemed we were never really working on the things that our customers actually wanted, but always on features that prospects like and may sell well.

After years of fighting to get the company aligned on a single product strategy, the other founder and I finally got it to that point, but we had lost a lot of business and had to fire nearly 30 people (half the company size). A relatively new power hungry product manager basically did a bunch of shareholder ass kissing behind closed doors. He then got elected as the new CEO, when the old CEO (who really wasn’t very good) got demoted. His true narcisistic/sociopathic nature was then revealed. At that point I couldn’t handle it anymore. The company still exists and I wish them well, but I am so happy to not be involved with it anymore.

It all got started with a lofty vision, but greed for money, status and power basically fucked it over from all sides.

I was a founder once and I had a very lofty vision for the future. I was very surprised when people started asking me for my exit strategy. What the hell, yo? I am trying to make the world a nicer place, not just fill my pockets.

Reminds me of “human resources”. My experiences with HR have also been largely negative. They’re there to protect and make sure the humans are a resource to the company, not for the humans and humanity.

And while you say this, this thread is full of people claiming it is actually very simple. sigh

Correlation is not causation my friend.

I have had to tell software engineers time and time again that is is totally okay to make error strings beyond one sentence or one word. It almost seems to me that they never realized that strings can hold multiple sentences and and don’t have relevant memory constraints.

One way my code improves is by thinking what I need to comment. Then I refactor some and the comments become somewhat redundant.

I’ll have a look when that type system is there. I am too dumb to program without a type system.

Scala 3 is such a nice language. People should really give that a fair trial, not looking back at Scala’s ugly past.

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Thanks for this. A lot of challenges for sure. I still don’t think it’s a bad business model per se and that these challenges can’t be addressed; I am sure they’ve thought of most of these challenges if not all. All business models are plagued with such challenges, but I think the worst thing about this one is simply that it is a departure from an old business model.

only for the last 30 years

For a game engine that does all the hard work? Why is this unreasonable. Have you any idea how much work goes into Unity?

Are you one of those “types are noobs” people?

Never heard of it, but it looks aweful

Yup. Most of the stink in companies start at the top, but there are suprisingly few people who are actually good at leadership. There are so many ego trips in management.

• Culture where you’re scared to criticize stuff, because people get angry when you’re telling them the truth or even just the elephant in the room. Echo chamber instead of idea lab.
• Management constantly making decisions such that no one decision made ever gets totally implemented, but the loose ends just stack up.
• Management not involving engineers in the and assuming that engineers are incapable of understanding how the business works, let alone contribute valuable ideas to how it might work better.
• Too many layers of hierarchy, competitive, macho male-dominated, title-driven, ego-driven culture where people are fighting they’re way up the totem pole instead of working cooperatively together to create a great experience for their users.
• Companies where silly little things that should be doable in hours costs weeks or months or where nothing gets done quickly, because too many people need to sign off on it.
• Mission statement that is bogus and you know that it really is all about money, growth and status. I like companies that are truly trying to adding value to the world, however small that change may be. I am just not interested in your algorithmic trading, crypto non-sense, optimizing ad revenue or getting people to waste more of their time or money with endless bull crap.
• Having to constantly fight to get the time to refactor, test, rethink, work on build/development/observability tooling instead of working on feature after feature endlessly. If I say something needs work I have good reasons for it that I am willing to explain, but do not assume that I like to waste time gold plating code because I am a autistic perfectionist with OCD with no sense for what the business is trying to do.
• Constant bogus deadlines that seem to come from nowhere and are only meant to keep the pressure on the engineers. I work hard and this kind of pressure only means we’re going to go fast in the short run and extremely slow in the long run, because nothing gets finished properly.
• Running the server side on Windows. I want to be able to debug issues in depth when they arise.
• Using the Go programming language. I am not going back to 80’s programming and checking for nil all day long, just to see my program segment fault in production anyway. (and yes, I am talking from experience here)
• Only remote companies. I get too lonely at some point and all the best cooperative ideas I’ve ever had in my career where born at the whiteboard with colleagues. This is just me though.

The real answer to the question you didn’t ask is: just don’t involve yourself in internet drama’s.

Tell me instead, what is the problem with a build step and typescript?

I am rooting for Mojo.