It's a bad company to work for

When at woke up this morning, at 5am, I saw the light coming from the other room. I was wondering did I forget to turn it off before going to bed, and I realized my wife wasn’t sleeping. Immediately I knew what was going on: she was working!

I usually wake up early in the morning to work too, so what’s the difference? The difference is she didn’t sleep but had been working for the whole day. The company she’s working for is rushing to launch something new to the users. They have been working hard for the past couple of days (or weeks), fixing bugs, testing end to end, to make sure it’s a successful launch.

It sounds pretty normal, isn’t it? We all have faced that in our career, working hard to deliver something meaningful to our customer. So what’s the problem?

The problem is it’s always the same for them whenever they launch something big. My wife has been working with this company for almost 2 years, and I have seen this happens again, and again, and again. They have to work their asses off, till midnight, and then weekend. I recently asked her: “was there a launch that you didn’t work overtime but still successful”? She wondered!!

So what’s the problem here? Through our conversations, I got to know that the engineering team was struggled to provide a good estimation, the deadline kept delayed over again and again, till a point they couldn’t afford any more delays. It’s an endless loop: dev, release internal, manual test, bugs here and there, fix the bug, and here comes another bug resulted from fixing the original bug…

There are many reasons but in my opinion, the main one is that they don’t have automation tests or unit tests (or very little, maybe, I don’t know). What I know for sure is their engineering quality is far from good. But they are a start-up, you say, they don’t afford time for the fancy time to write unit tests or automation tests, you say. I don’t disagree! I was there, working for a start-up where the unit test was fancy, overtime was normal, and never get paid for that. The thing is, they are no longer in a stage that struggles to validate their idea or business model or survive. They got funding, they are expanding to other markets, but still avoid to improve the engineering quality.

I blame the leadership. Many times talking to my wife, I wondered did they ever do a retrospective and say: “It’s enough, let’s invest in improving automation tests and engineering quality, so we could be more accurate with the estimation, and less painful to launch a big thing”. I blame the leadership for not acting (or not aggressive enough) to improve their employees’ life. It’s not once or twice, it’s every single f**king time for the last 2 years. In my extreme point of view, they are just trying to reap off their employees, trying to extract as much as they can, but paying just the normal 8-hour wage.

If your leaders just care about the business, how to acquire more users, how to grow revenue, how to expand to other markets, and just ignore their staff’s mental health problems, it’s a terrible company to be with. You may say they don’t have the budget for that? I disagree. If you invest 3 months to improve the automation test suite and engineering quality, your next launch will be much less painful, your estimation will be more accurate, and your customers will be happier, your employees will have more time to learn and come up with better ideas to improve things.

I used to learn a lot from working in a startup and I keep encouraging others, especially ones who are just in the early days of their career, to join a startup. It not only provides you great opportunities to touch on many different aspects of a business but also the opportunity to be successful in both financial and career paths. Imagine you joined Facebook in the early days, you would have been a billionaire now. However, not all startup is Facebook, so you need to know which company is good to stick around. In the end, it’s your mental health matters and it’s not sustainable to maintain an unhealthy work-life balance.

If you’re interviewing to join a startup as an engineer, ask them how good is their engineering practices, do they have CI/CD setup? They may not have for now, but ask their point of view about investing in improving the engineering quality. Ask them situational questions like the situation I described above, would they be willing to block feature development for 3 months to write unit tests? If you’re already with the company, suggest them that we need to slow down in order to go faster and see how they react.

In the end, a company that doesn’t care about its employees or not constantly challenge their status quo is less likely to be successful. They may survive, but will just be a mediocre company, so what’s good for you staying (for a long time) in such a company?