Tell HN: I quit my job Starting full-time on my startup on Monday.
One thought I wanted to share was on my experience letting my coworkers know that I am leaving. I was definitely not prepared for the responses I received. When people first heard I was leaving almost everyone jokingly responded with "Traitor! Who are you leaving us for? Is it more money?!". But once I explained that I'm doing my own thing the attitude change was amazing. I wasn't told "You're crazy!" but instead I was congratulated and applauded as if I had broken free from some captor and were cheering me to run as fast and as far as I can. I was also reminded over and over again to remember them as if I was supposed to return and free them. Perhaps one day :)
Of course, from my perspective I feel more like I'm late to a marathon that I have been jealously watching others run for years. The feedback we received from our 'Review our Site' posts as well as everyone's experiences that were shared here have definitely helped us get to where we are today.
Thank you Hacker News - Here we go!
37 comments
[ 3.8 ms ] story [ 102 ms ] threadI can't wait to be free.
(In case anyone didn't notice, I'm OP's co-founder)
Congratulations!
nothing wrong with leaving a company, but developers should at least leave their work maintainable.
I maintain that developers and engineers should leave their work maintainable.
I know I'm going to get downvoted, but this needs to be said. With great programming power comes great programming responsibilities. And you and I know this power doesn't come from silicon or management.
We all bitch about crappy products, and fail to see the developers on the other leave their turd piles for management to "manage".
Or we bitch about crappy code left behind by the prior owners -- spitting at the sky playing musical chairs.
If you need to leave your job, at least offer to maintain your shit. Don't leave them trembling in fear. Save us greedy monkeys.
Now, C# and Java are pretty close syntactically so hopefully they'll be OK. There is a huge difference in libraries and core API structure as well as deployment though, so it's not just an easy step to take. Having marginal .NET skills does not translate to marginal Java skills though. We do have a brand new Java dev, but it's really asking alot to put all of this on their shoulders with just a few months out of college.
Isn't that the same as keeping your job but deciding you don't want to be paid for it? Typing up a polished design doc for your successor would be the best thing to do, anything more would be paid consultant work.
No, it's not like you're working full time. Anyone can offer to help out a couple hours a week after they leave. It's not just good service, but it's also the most intelligent thing we can do: the original writer of software is by far in the best position to maintain it. If we all did this, we'd all benefit.
Life is not a comic book turned into a movie. Companies have no responsibility to employ people. People have no responsibilities to support former employers. If the employer says "That's fine, leave" then just leave. It's a financial decision they made signaling that it is time for you to move on.
Anyways, you're right. If the employer tells you to leave, you're not obligated to do anything besides leave.
It's a two way street- I do my best to leave behind a maintainable code base and a documented data center, but the company being left has to do its due diligence as well.
Monday eh? 9am sharp? Does your startup already have a defined work week and business hours? :)
Of course, we'll most likely work way more hours for our own company. I already have a hard time stopping myself from coding every night.
1. Start every day at the same time. Be reasonable. 10 AM is acceptable. But be consistent.
2. Make sure you give yourself time away from your company. Yes, you'll love it and want to work late nights. However, giving yourself a 2 hour break to go out, have a nice dinner with your co-founder, and maybe have a beer or two will do wonders. Even if you end up talking about business.
3. Dress smart. Keep yourself groomed properly. It sounds silly, but really, you are your company. If you can't take care of yourself, you can't take care of your company.
4. Stay focused. You know what drives you. At least at the start, build stuff you want to build. Don't let other people deter you. You'll have a lot of "If it only did this..." comments. That's rubbish. Don't get me wrong. If the idea is good and you want to take it on, do so! But don't feel obligated. The good deals always came because of the work I wanted to do, not from some "If you build this, I'll buy" comment.
Naaa. Those were other marathons. Your marathon starts Monday.
The marathon analogy seems especially appropriate. No need to be jealous or worry about the competition. Just participate and finish. Best wishes!
That's exactly the feedback I got from my former coworkers as well - 95% were very happy, and had the "well, at least someone is getting out of here for the better things" attitude.
Keep in mind though - you'll have to be working much harder than you ever did at your day job ;))
Good luck!
All the best to the OP and you as well!
If you can spare the time, keep a notebook of what you experience, online or offline doesn't matter much. Later when you look back you'll be surprised how much use that can have.
I have a couple suggestions for your landing page:
* The current overall payload is 382.1K. You could significantly reduce this and speed up the load time if you enable gzip compression on your web server. Seems like you're running this on IIS 6.0--there is a configuration option for HTTP compression buried somewhere in the submenus, I believe.
* The rounded corners have a white background, whereas the page background at the top is gray. This causes the top corners to have a very visible rectangular edge. The IE-6 friendly way to fix this is to change the background color for the top corners to match the background color of the top of the page. If you don't care about IE 6, you can simply give them transparent backgrounds.
Good luck!
http://dictionary.reference.com/browse/actionable
I'm also not sure how many people noticed but the name is IActionable not iActionable. It comes from the concept of Interfaces types which many object-oriented languages have.