HN Explorer

Gave up on rude cofounder

3 points by boggled ↗ HN
I walked away from a project I was working on in my spare time with a friend, after repeated attempts to introduce sound engineering were greeted with an angrily and aggressively uttered, "WHY?". An example: WHY do we need websockets to update an image instead of forcing the user to refresh the page manually? He is in dire financial straits--let him find an unpaid programmer who can appreciate being mistreated by a person who seems to think he's channeling Steve Jobs while his house is being foreclosed. I wad tired of waiting weeks and months before obviously bad and unworkable design decisions became evident to him, which usually involved a relative observing and pointing out the obvious.

7 comments

[ 4.2 ms ] story [ 30.7 ms ] thread
m1k3yboi
I lol'd at this. How old is he? He sounds very immature. There is just no telling some people. :-)
boggled
Three times the average age of the typical HN wunderkind.
lmm
Cool story bro. Seriously, this just seems like an uninformative rant - what are you trying to contribute to HN?
ColinWright
This is clearly a follow up to your previous rant:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7324430

Ask yourself this - what are you achieving by posting this here? Are you just venting? Or are you genuinely trying to make the situation better? As it stands, as others have said, this is just a rant with no value, either to us, or to you.

boggled
It's venting. I'm assuming that a measure zero but nonempty subset of the HN community operates as a support group. The rest is either neutral or actively and gratuitously hostile. Incidentally, you could not "know" that my rant has no value to me, at least if you believe that knowledge is true justified belief, since the rant did have value to me. I do not claim that it has value to anyone else, though there may be some value in knowing how attempted collaborations can go awry in specific cases. Finally I am attempting to rectify the situation by recording my decision to leave. This makes it more difficult and potentially embarrassing to reverse the decision.
ColinWright
If you feel that this really did have value then I stand corrected. My personal experience is that venting like this has usually, if not always, had, on balance, negative effects. My experience is that venting feels better, but is counter-productive in the longer run.

I genuinely hope you are the exception. I genuinely hope that you find a way to make the situation better, and possibly retrieve it from the car crash it appears to be.

boggled
Negative effects? How so? It might be discovered? It is true that focusing on negatives can be counterproductive, and some negative emotions are better off unexpressed. However, I am following the advice of a Harvard business school professor to "quit early and often" in this case. I have other projects of my own that I wish to pursue. What I have decided is to encourage my cofounder to find others he can work with, which he is doing. No agreements are written and no company or partnership has been formed, so there are no contractual issues. (Maybe a loss for me if the venture does eventually become successful, but I believe this is a low probability event.)

I did try to improve things after my first pseudonymous rant (which you noted). Remaining professional under difficult circumstances was a good exercise, but I have had enough. The experience of finding work in a place free of manipulation, hostility and psychological baggage led me to the conclusion that I need not suffer these things, especially not in a spare time project.