Ask HN: How do I leave a startup on philosophical grounds?
I have been working for a startup here in beautiful San Francisco for a little while now as a programmer and mathematician, I was drawn to the startup because I thought the idea was valuable and wanted to be a part of something that was going to impact a lot of people's lives, in addition, one of the founders has a considerable social media presence that I thought would be able to bring us to new heights. I was also the first technical hire and was excited to be applying a lot of statistics and machine learning theory to my job as well as shaping the technical future of the company. Only one catch - I would be paid nothing until the company went through Round A financing, which was said at the time I was brought on to be closing, at the latest, the first week of October.
I started out by working on an machine learning algorithm for automatically parsing and constructing tweets, under the guise that we would be targeting people who were obviously interested in the services our startup offered. Using a structured learning approach (and thorough application of k-means :), the accuracy and ability of the program to mass-message interested parties grew exponentially, I noticed potential for abuse, and I talked to a casual friend at twitter to verify this was OK - indeed it was as long as it didn't get out of hand, ever confident in my ability to 'keep things from getting out of hand'. As time grew on, the CEO of the company pressured me into using it to the ends of spamming people and (effictively) asking me get around twitter's spam detection algorithms and in general make twitter a worse place to be. I voiced objections and the CEO of the company basically told me I was naive and that everyone in the space was doing this.
As time went on, the work environment became more stressful, despite the fact that I had only committed to evenings 3 days a week, I came in a few extra times during the past weeks in order to meet some deadlines for the site. When I took a day off (In reality, not a day off, it was a day I was slated to have off), the CEO of the company was very upset with me because I had given her 'the impression' that I would be working all the time from there on out.
I should also reiterate at this point that I'm the only technical employee, but not the only employee. We have a 'community manager', 'Product Manager', 'CFO' and a number of writers. I should note that our startup has nothing to do with writing, and is actually in the social discovery space. I don't feel this is an optimum organization for a company, but I haven't said anything about it.
One night, the CEO and CFO of the company wanted to make a Gantt chart of our progress, we went through various development scenarios (Rather, what various non-programmer's impression of how development works scenarios), and I was continually asked how long certain events ranging from how long it would take to "warm up" our MCMC algorithm in the site's recommendation engine to how long certain programming tasks would take. Unfortunately I didn't have a whole lot of solid data at the time, so I told them the only thing I knew - "I'm sorry, I don't have a way of making a good estimate". After two or three times, the CEO was visibly irritated that I couldn't tell how long it would take and we decided to break.
The next day the CEO brought me into a conference room and told me I was being uncooperative, I was a little taken aback by this but I asked her to explain. She was concerned that I wasn't working full-time (I've deceived the reader a bit here, because full-time implies you're being paid), even though I had worked just one week full-time, out of the kindness of my heart in order to meet deadlines. She continued to explain that my philosophical objections to some things that were happening in the company were only slowing us down and weren't productive, as well as the fact that "As an engineer, you know how to do math and computers, on't tell me...
22 comments
[ 3.3 ms ] story [ 70.1 ms ] threadHowever, your CEO is correct in that you are absolutely, incredibly naive.
You are being taken advantage of, and are being naive by staying. You are also being naive by thinking that your lack of a university degree is an impediment. Gates, Jobs, Zuck were all dropouts.
However, I do always enjoy talking about technology, if you have any questions you'd like to run by me I'm more than happy to chat!
Get out now. It's a deathtrap.
My feeling is the reason they don't have any other engineers is because they couldn't sucker anyone else into this...
Oh, and if you're going with the job offer you got (and you should), don't offer to "help out" for the current job a few hours a week. They'll still have expectations from you to work more than you can.
Line up a paying gig, get it confirmed in writing (heck, start if you can since you're working on this "part time") and then resign. Do not get into it with the CEO over appropriateness of treating an employee or the product. Really, truly, do not do this. Do not give the CEO any room to argue with you, or to make a case against you.
Just resign: you found a paying gig. You don't owe them any more explanation than that.
Document everything. Do not sign any termination agreements, you're not an employee and I assume you didn't sign a contract. If you signed an NDA then verbally agree to abide by the NDA for a fixed period of time (make sure you have a printed copy of the NDA stashed away somewhere).
Now, if you did sign a contract or employment agreement, then honestly the first thing you should do tomorrow is find a labor attorney and get some legal advice. This will cost money. This will cost less money than either the pain of continuing at this organization, or the potential litigation.
It also sounds like an unhealthy situation: imbalanced team, sketchy uncertain compensation (cash/equity), low respect, nothing to help you with where you need to grow (which includes both technical peers and having the confidence to interview elsewhere).
No point in trying to rush something to 'complete' and only then leave. Software is never done. They'll need to get more engineers in any case, those new engineers should do it the way they'll need to.
Respect anything you've signed so far; don't sign anything new; don't directly compete or take anything you wrote for the current unpaid project with you.
Though you say the CEO is nice, it also sounds like you're being a little bullied, and expect to get more 'temper' from people when you leave. Brush it off; it's their situation and emotional reactions, not an objective analysis of things. Don't get into a long discussion, don't accept a 'counter-offer' or promise of change. Go elsewhere definitively.
There's no reason to work a single minute more for free for these people.
This may be beyond the scope of "business," but I agree with the don't burn bridges comments. It is your responsibility to get yourself out of a bad situation as soon as you can, but as long as you have the power to do it gracefully, and with respect, that's the right thing to do - or rather, it will bring you good karma ;)
And don't worry about dooming the company. You owe them absolutely nothing. Zero. Well, negative, since they owe you a lot. If the company thinks it can get by with a single unpaid engineer, they're not going very far anyway, and this will be a good wake-up call that they need to re-evaluate their priorities.
If you really can't keep yourself from feeling bad about leaving them, offer to work for market rate (something like $100/hour as a consultant) for a little while so you can finish up the product and give them some time to find someone else, but don't work another day for them without knowing that you'll be immediately compensated. And set a hard deadline, like 30 days, for when you're out of there, because you shouldn't stay anywhere that doesn't respect you for too long even if they are paying you.
And yes, technical interviews around here are pretty tough, but the only way to see if you can make it through is to try a few. It sounds like you're smart enough to do very well at them.
Shameless plug time: I interned at Cloudera this summer. I had a great time and learned a ton. The people there are extremely smart. A huge proportion of the company are engineers, and pretty much all of the management is highly technical. They'd be very interested in talking to someone who hacks on NoSQL databases and is active in ML research. I could see you on the platform team, contributing to HBase and/or Mahout, and there are some Data Science and Solution Architect roles that could involve your ML experience.
Here's the careers page: http://www.cloudera.com/company/careers/
- You're saying the CEO doesn't share your moral objections and even derides them. Did it cross your mind that maybe she's the type who also wouldn't mind tricking someone to work for her for free? Sounds to me like you're probably being taken advantage of, so get out. Once out, stay out. There isn't much to advocate for, in a relationship that starts with one party taking advantage of another.
- don't sweat your lack of diploma.
- I haven't made a cv in a while, but I'd advise you to meet with someone that could help you refine yours and prepare for interviews.
- try to get an idea of what you would be worth in the current market. I've seen a few posts on HN and some Stack Exchange sites discussing the topic. I believe you're capable of digging up that information, or maybe someone would be kind enough to post some links. That sort of info isn't pinpoint accurate, but having even ballpark numbers is always comforting when making demands and in your case, I feel that you could use the reassurance.
Honestly, she doesn't sound very nice. She sounds like the kind of person with good social skills of the sort that allow her to take advantage of people by, say, bullying them into working for free and then putting them in the position that they would feel enormously guilty if they left because they are the only engineer. For people who are very socially astute and also in a position of power, such situations are often planned, not mere coincidence.
I suggest you find a means to deal with your personal weaknesses in terms of not feeling comfortable interviewing and what not.