Bylina about how I worked in a startup

Once upon a time I lived a good fellow. And the fellow twisted in his old work, and went in search of a new life. And I came to a startup overseas with the founder of England. And he was happy. And he worked there for thirty years and almost three years, and was refined to the breakdown of the nervous and burnout emotional. And he decided to talk about his adventures under the cut.



I will not bore you with an epic language. In this article I want to talk about my almost 3 years of experience working in a small foreign startup, about approaches to solving problems, personnel management, project management, about my personal impressions and conclusions. To paraphrase a famous song, there are a lot of articles about startups, I’ll write another one. What for? It’s not worth it to show startup founders how to do it, and for employees — at what moments it is time to think about further prospects and generally how to take care of themselves. Also, for obvious reasons, I will not voice the name of the project itself and will not particularly go into the numbers. The article came out long, with smooth flowing from the details of the project into personal experiences. Forgive me the reader.

How it all began

Without going into the reasons, at some point I felt the need to change jobs. For the sake of experiment, I was looking for remote work, and it was in a foreign company. At Upwork, which was then still oDesk, I came across an ad for recruitment in a young but ambitious project focused on the US market. Promised interesting tasks, and offered a higher salary. At that time, I was not confused by the fact that the emphasis was placed on employees from developing countries (where, accordingly, it is quite possible to pay less). And perhaps it should have been. It is worth giving them their due, however. On the corresponding page of the site, they were not even too lazy to make a small converter, which translated their bid on currencies of various underdevelopedcountries of the world, among which Pakistan, India, Nepal and other exotic were in a row with Ukraine and Russia.

They responded to my application fairly quickly and assigned me the first part of the interview, where, in addition to general questions, there was one problem that needed to be solved using InterviewZen (a useful thing if you need to track the interviewee’s thinking, by the way). In short, an array of exchange rate fluctuation values ​​was given in a small limit, with a total spread of <0.1. It was necessary to normalize and plot the oscillations so that they were visible.

As the founder admitted months later, it was the first day of hiring, and during it he almost managed to lose faith in humanity. The number of interviews already went by tens, but I was the first to solve it. Either in the target countries everything is very bad with mathematics and algorithms, or just everything was bad for those who agreed to work for the proposed money, but the fact remains. In his experience, dozens and dozens of people, many of whom had been engaged in web programming for years, were not able to solve a simple problem.

At the second stage, which took place almost immediately, their CTO talked to me, he was the founder’s brother, and they offered me a probationary period in combination with the main job, and soon a full-time job.

General working conditions

Unlike some start-ups that I heard about, and where everything rests on uradio patriotism from the series “our idea is super cool, we will definitely cost as much as two Google, so for now tolerate no salary at all,” the salary was supposed to be here. Moreover, it approximately corresponded to the market salary of a June or a weak middle person in PHP with knowledge of English, at least in Ukraine (I suppose, and in other countries where employees were searched). But there were nuances. In particular, we were contractors. Accordingly, we ourselves were responsible for paying taxes, we were not supposed to have paid sick leave and leave, and the number of unpaid was limited to 2 weeks per year.

All work was carried out remotely, the work schedule was free. It was very desirable that my working time overlap with the others as much as possible, but they worked quite a lot anyway, so it was not so difficult to do. The only requirement is 40 hours per week according to the activity tracker. And that means 40 hours of honest work. The tracker recorded almost everything that is possible: screenshots, webcam snapshots, keyboard and mouse activity, websites visited. Naturally, no one was shot for excommunication for 5 minutes in the toilet or for coffee, but long periods of idleness were easily fixed and were not encouraged at all. People who were not able to organize their work quickly eliminated and were sent to look beyond the distance.

Also, as startups should, I was offered a stock option. I was supposed to be about 0.15% of the total pool of shares, smeared for 4 years. After the first year of work, I relied for the first quarter on a full-time basis, with further monthly proportional extra charge. This was all recorded only in Google Sheets and in an electronically signed contract.

Advice to owners. Offer even hired employees shares in the project. It still stimulates, because the employee starts working at least 0.1% for himself, and not just for salary. On this subject more than once was written on the Habré, including the legal complexity of practical implementation in Russia and Ukraine. But if you are doing a real project, and not playing a startup and / or sawing money from investors, then try. The loyalty of good, time-tested employees is still useful.

First months

When I got to work, they told me that we were getting ready to launch the product publicly. Presumably it was supposed to take place in 3 months or so. This detail will be of importance in the future, but for now, it was of primary importance - which task will be my first in the project. The general policy was this: to give a new employee to do what it would not be a pity to throw out, if he arranges. Those. some new feature from the project roadmap.

And it became integration with popular (and not so) online accounting systems. Tasks were posed without specific detailed specifications. Not everyone likes this approach, of course, but I personally like it, because challenges and gives room for creativity. After all, it was not only to deal with several APIs and learn how to post data there. It was necessary to understand the basics of accounting, the basics of the US tax system, to think over the structure on our side, to understand how and what data should be posted, etc.

Advice to employees. If you like just any one stage of software development (for example, only code writing, only testing or only design) - you better go past a startup. They usually need a shvets, a reaper, and a dude on a pipe.

It took about a month to fully implement the first integration (the model, its verification with an accountant from the USA, implementation in code, licking, unit tests). Then things went more fun, of course, because There was a ready-made sample for subsequent implementations.

Soon a couple more people were invited to work, who were entrusted with the finished model to make other integrations. Naturally, new people come along with their style of writing code, which caused some complications in the future. Here, perhaps, it is worth making a digression and tell what it was

Code base

It all started with a small family business - a call center in the Philippines. And software was originally written specifically for accounting and control of call center employees. Actually, the monitoring mentioned above, so necessary when you hire Filipinos, grew from here. They have such a peculiar approach to work, either their own, or inherited from the time of Spanish colonization. As someone beautifully described it, "Filipinos value their personal time too much to work efficiently."

The bottom line is that the code was originally written for internal business needs and processes. At some point, they had an idea that it turned out quite well, and it would be possible to turn the product for internal needs into SaaS. There were several potential directions: accounting for working hours, calculation of salaries and taxes, preparation of tax forms (also called payroll), an online solution for call centers (telephony).

The code has been written for at least 7 years by the time I joined the company. Those. it all began at a time when the currently popular frameworks were still in their early post-embryonic stages (and jQuery too). And object-oriented programming in PHP was rather the lot of advanced ones, and many still calmly managed procedural spaghetti code with a bunch of include, require, require_once. In this form, I found the project code: spaghetti, almost no OOP, variables and functions arising from nowhere and disappearing into nothing, almost no unit tests, naked JS on the frontend. Sometimes it was proudly called “our own framework” (our own framework).

I used the word “almost” above, since the era of change is ripe, and the first steps to converting the code base into OOP have already been taken. Accordingly, all the new features were necessarily written object-oriented, with unit tests, but you still had to interact with the core of the system through require and global. At that stage, they solemnly promised me that I would not have to rake the Augean stables, and they would convert their code over time on their own.

Advice to owners. Keep up with current trends when writing code. Try to take into account and lay in the financial model the possible need for its updating / refactoring for new technologies or even other frameworks. Otherwise, at some point you may find that you are working with a mammoth litter with a very outdated code base. As a result:

1. you still have to rewrite it anyway, but the process will be much more painful, sometimes requiring several iterations of refactoring;
2. it will be more difficult for new employees to understand what and how it works for you in general, and you will have to spend more resources on their introduction to the course of things. Some, at the sight of what they have to work with, can simply cross their heels and leave.

Advice to employees. Be careful if you have to get stuck in some rare framework or legacy code for a long time. You can get a lot of economically useless (i.e., not affecting your value as a specialist) experience.

Remote work and teamwork

When your team is scattered across countries, there are some difficulties in communication, both obvious and not so. For example, people have such a psychological barrier of anxiety. If you are stuck, or if you have a question, it will be easy for you to approach a person sitting in the same room and ask. Within a minute or two, an answer was received, and you can continue to work. If the person’s room is in another country, you will most likely write your question to him and wait patiently. Or ask if you can call, and only then call. The term of the decision is greatly stretched.

There are other nuances. For example, it is difficult to assess whether a person does what you expect until he pushes his code. And since we all worked in the master branch (crime, I know), push happened when the code already worked somehow. And then we return to a couple of people who were entrusted with picking up my integration.

The integration code with the accounting system was implemented without much sophistication. One accounting system - one class with all the necessary functions for interaction. Not so much data was transmitted, and we felt that splitting into smaller classes makes no sense. New people (both were from the same city and worked together, by the way) felt that it was worth doing otherwise - composer packages, splitting operations into a bunch of small classes, etc. Perhaps it was beautiful and elegant from an academic point of view, but from a practical point of view, it didn’t improve the work with the code at all (code similar in functionality was written in different styles) and did not speed up the development (instead of taking a ready-made class with a ready-made structure and rewriting it under another API, they rolled their own bike). In addition, it turned out to be difficult for people to organize their own working hours: frequent breaks, shortcomings, low activity according to the tracker. As a result, what was supposed to be a simple replication of the ready-made solution stretched about as much as this solution was developed from scratch. The chef found this approach unproductive and had to say goodbye to both. Following them, they said goodbye to their developments, and I had to add a few more integrations.

Advice to owners. Take care not only of the availability of a code style guide, but also of its careful study by new employees.

Advice to employees. If you see that something can be improved, do not do it yourself. Consult a "senior in rank". Either you convince him of the need for improvement and implementation of your recommendations in both new and existing code, or he convinces you of the need to do as others already do. There may be reasons for this. For it is said: Do not create a zoo in your code.

I think it will be useful to mention which tools we used in our work (many of them probably already know that).

• Trello - for task lists. The company did not use modern project management systems. Each had their own board in Trello, where the “To do”, “Doing”, “Done” columns were mandatory, plus any others at their discretion (for example, “To do later” for tasks that would be good to do but not lit , “To do - a subsystem”, when you had to postpone work on something and switch to other tasks, etc.). Everyone had write access to the boards of other employees to add bugs found in their code if necessary. Everyone could see who was doing what now. At the end of the working day, the dump from the “Done” column was transferred to the tracker as a daily report. Nobody tortured anyone with any additional reports.
• Slack - for individual correspondence and group notifications (from the series “I made some serious changes, make a pull at the earliest opportunity”). By the way, not so long ago Slack was introduced in UA-Hosting . Now, customer service employees receive automatic notifications of new tickets and payments (both on a working computer and on the phone). This allows them to respond more quickly to customer requests and issue new orders. And also whisper behind the backs of the authorities.
• Skype - for calling, sometimes for screen sharing "on the little things."
• Mikogo - for a more thorough screen-sharing during joint testing.
• Intranet - own knowledge base on various issues. The landfill of all that once may come in handy or may erode from the head. Strictly speaking, there were several of them - for developers, for call center employees, call center managers.

Vector change

Summer came, the launch did not take place. The chief decided to shift the vector from payroll to telephony. But it took a few more months to add the necessary functionality. I again got the “remote” tasks - integration of my own calling base with CRM systems.

The wording was again quite abstract - it was necessary to post data on outgoing calls to the system as lead / contact events and using the existing Chrome plug-in, find phone numbers on the CRM page and convert them into call links via our own dialer. The second part of the task turned out to be especially “fun”, but on the whole it was possible to get it to work.

Then there was another integration - more exciting. With a payment system (and the implementation of payment acceptance in general; before that, there were few customers and payments were processed manually, but we were preparing for a commercial launch). The parent company was registered in Hong Kong, and at that time (autumn 2015), the Braintree Payments payment gateway was the most profitable in this situation.

Launch? The launch went like a plop into a puddle very quietly. Just a few more call center customers appeared who already paid through Braintree with a card. And the vector was again shifted towards payroll.

Teamwork, or 8 months in the Philippines

Honestly, I vaguely recall my tasks for the first half of 2016. Perhaps they were not so interesting, perhaps the family crisis took the forefront in my memory. I only remember that there was a salary increase (already the second). Be that as it may, in July, the chef suggested flying to them in the Philippines and working as a team.

The conditions were as follows: I am paid for a one-way flight, accommodation and visa extension costs, in return I work for an additional 10 hours a week. For most self-respecting people, the signal “what the hell?” Should have triggered. In fact, I flew on a business trip at my own expense, because my hourly rate, multiplied by the “free” hours, approximately gave the cost of everything that they “paid me”. But I had to unwind, and in the Philippines I have long wanted to visit. Approximately since I read that the average annual temperature there is about +26 .. + 27 degrees - just my comfortable temperature.


They settled me in a small studio apartment on the 42nd floor, overlooking the South cemetery of Manila. When it was completely boring, I could watch from above the life of the inhabitants of the cemetery (yes, there are quite living people there, cook food, dry sheets on fences and all that). And the very next day I started to work.

Well, the next day ... The next night. After all, we were preparing to launch in 3-4 months, and since the product is focused on the United States, the chief decided to work at the same time as all the States. In the Philippines, it is deep night at this time. But since A considerable percentage of the country's economy is made up of call centers focused on English-speaking countries (Filipino English is much better and more understandable than Hindu, for example), night shifts there are something commonplace, and public transport runs almost around the clock. I still did not know if I could combine 50 working hours and a night shift, but I decided to try to work 10 hours a day, leaving myself 2 days off. And, to my surprise, it turned out very well. It became easier to focus when everyone around was focused and worked hard.

In addition, they were able to give me tasks that are closer in essence to the core of the product. I would not say that at the same time they were more fun and exciting, however. I got work with tax forms.


At the time of the transfer of the task to my hands, the system already had a mechanism for adding scans of paper forms to the system and placing input fields on them with some validation / formatting of data, and almost all the necessary forms were added. But at this stage they were just blanks. I had to plunge headlong into the sewers a pool of little useful knowledge, partially described above under the spoiler.

Apparently, because I was able to work 50 hours a week, the boss decided to raise rates and offered to work 60 hours a week in exchange for doubling the option. The conditions were the same as for the first - the first admission for the year, then - on a monthly basis. Those. if I fly from 60 hours earlier than a year later, I get a fir cone. Having counted millions from the sale of shares in the future, all 0 friends in the Philippines and celebrating my 30th anniversary through Google Hangouts, I agreed with one caveat: I want to see the project launch before the end of my stay in the Philippines. The boss absolutely agreed with the reservation, because it has already been decided - we will start in 3-4 months.

And spun. A small proprietary markup language for pulling the necessary data into the form fields, imprinting signatures on forms, generating PDF from this kind, forms requiring several signatures, different people, processing client to-do to display the current list, status and deadlines for submitting forms, onboarding new ones employees ... And at the same time, they slowly began to involve in the refactoring of the old code written by them themselves years ago. As a result…

I smell burnout

Something like this was told to me by a local man with whom I surprisingly managed to get out of business, working 10 hours a night, 6 nights a week. It was already the 5th month of my stay in the Philippines, the chief decided to switch to a human schedule and work during the day. And we did not start. Again. “After all, so many things are not perfect.”

Advice to owners. Get started. At least closed alpha. Better is open beta. Best the enemy of the good. In addition, the constant work "on the table" kills the creator.


I have not read this book myself, but the title seems appropriate.

By the 5th month, I began to quietly hate my work, tasks, approach to management ... In short, almost everything. But he continued to stubbornly step on his throat, get up in the morning and go to the office. I already felt how my nervous system was shaken and meeeble destroyed. I had some reactions that I had not noticed before.

At the end of February, I pulled out 2 days off in a row instead of 1. Well, how I pulled out ... I worked 12 days without days off and got 2 days off in a row. And flew away for a couple of days to a neighboring island (Cebu), to travel and meet with one old acquaintance. We sat on the seashore, drank wine, talked, listened to the surf ... Apparently, at that moment I exhaled for the first time in 6 months. About another week at work I was drawn with all my guts that Saturday night and peace.

Advice to employees. Let yourself breathe out. According to statistics released by the Center for Disease Control, 2.7% of suicides are among mathematicians and the IT sector, with 85% of these being men. There is also a memorial category on the Wiki that is also suggestive. The goal of your employer is to get the most out of you for the money paid. In this case, your goal is not to ditch your main working tool, i.e. brain and nervous system. If the machine you chop off your hand - you will receive disability and pension (albeit beggarly). If you get burned out, and you get twisted from the type of code, you will not get anything, although in essence it will be the same disability. Just too unobvious.

Homecoming

As planned, in early April, after nearly 8 months in the Philippines, I flew home. A short week-long vacation to “see something else in Asia,” and again for work. And then 10 hours a day, 6 days a week. Only it was harder. I was myself, that atmosphere was not. And even without the inspired look of the boss, who believed in his project like that, my faith slowly began to dry up. Although the launch was planned for the summer, and it was necessary to quickly finish onboarding with a file and refactor their old spaghetti code into an object-oriented one. Moreover, I also had to come up with a class structure, into which their spaghetti could be nicely packed.

About a month later, I came to a deep understanding that I was stuck in a swamp. I didn’t grow at all in any way: neither professionally (legacy code refactoring is a so-so line in the resume), nor career (and where in the company of 4-5 developers?), Nor financially (there was no way and was not foreseen a salary review for a year). I took courage and said that I want to return to the 40-hour working day. Moreover, changes were brewing for me, which also had to be prepared. I still do not quite understand what is wrong with me, and why for this I needed to pack up my courage. The terms of the deal were simple: I work for 60 hours if we start while I am in the Philippines. I’ve been at home for a month now, and it doesn’t really smell like a launch. The boss suggested that the conditions for doubling the option be maintained if I modify the remaining 4 months within a year from that moment.

Advice to employees. Love yourself. Do not make yourself a star, but love. For historical reasons, we often do not value ourselves, and this must be fought.

Emigration

One of the useful by-products of working in a hellish schedule (and perhaps the only one) is that you do not have time to spend money. There is neither strength nor time left. I had long planned to emigrate to Latvia, but now I finally managed to gather enough to fulfill the legal requirement for financial security. Cheerfully and cheerfully, for two July days off I moved to my new place of residence.

Among the tasks, refactoring of the old code more and more prevailed, as well as skipping the workability of the integration that was created a couple of years ago. At first, the euphoria from stalling supported me, but nothing lasts forever.

The crisis of the genre

One fine September day, I looked at the code book and saw a fig, caught myself thinking that I was in a stupor. The task was very simple, but the code in me ended. A little more I looked at the screen, honestly confessed to myself in the depths of the head devastation, stopped the timer, took out beer from the refrigerator and went to the sea. And when the beer was over, he returned to the refrigerator, took another one and left in the same direction. And the next day I went to the doctor. And he sent to another. And after a while I got a conclusion according to which asthenia, moderate depression, anxiety and suicidal thoughts were found in me. But I found out a little later.

Immediately after visiting the first doctor, I tried to work more, but I had enough for a day and a half. And I told the chief that I was sintered, and I needed a few days of rest. I don’t know how much, I will know - I’ll say. Somewhere in 5-6 days I started work again, but doing it was becoming more and more difficult. The race for 40 hours a week according to the tracker has already turned into some kind of neurosis. And after some time I was prescribed antidepressants.

Advice to everyone.Given the specifics of the work of programmers, the risk of making depression is increased in comparison with many other professions. It affects mental stress, social isolation, negative thinking (admit honestly: are you more likely to look for bugs or enjoy the beauty and elegance of your creation?), Etc. We are all depressed from time to time. But if the bill went for weeks, or even months, it's time to consult a specialist. It is better to spend less money on it now, than more then, when you will no longer be able to even earn them. And yet, not always friends can adequately understand a person with depression and help him, and this can only get worse. Explaining to a healthy person what depression is is like explaining what an electric shock is to someone who has never put their fingers into a power outlet.

Final chords

If any of you reached such a state, I think he understands that further work in this state is a real torment. Nevertheless, the mice cried, pricked, but continued to nibble the cactus. In December, my productivity began to plummet, I could not cope with 40 hours a week. I wanted to ask for a sabbatical, and the boss actively reminded about the remaining 4 months, 60 hours a week for the sake of doubling the option. And he called to Georgia, where at that time he was with his family, for team work. And although the value of my option has already increased 183 times (from 0 to 0) for more than 2.5 years, for some reason I agreed. But I firmly decided for myself that from Georgia in 4 months I am no longer returning as an employee of this company. The dynamically developing startup turned out to be a sluggishly growing family business with ambitions and without decisiveness.

Upon arrival in Georgia, I got some interesting tasks associated with a new priority launch vector - expanding the call center. But no deadlines were given, and the tasks themselves were enough for two weeks, after which - welcome back to the wonderful world of refactoring. The presence of colleagues around did not help and did not stimulate. Actually, nothing helped and did not stimulate. For about a week, my brain was more puzzled by the question "how will I solve my problems if I quit right now" (there was no special financial pillow) than the work itself. And I did what it would be worth doing a long time ago - I just quit. I handed over the affairs, left my working computer and flew away.

The moral of this fable is this ...

About six months have passed, and still the very thought of looking into PHP code still encounters strong internal resistance. I even seriously thought about whether to change my occupation. But practice has shown that other programming languages ​​do not cause such a rejection. So for now, stay with you.

But seriously, don't bring yourself to exhaustion and devastation. You are alone. A wise employer will keep an eye on not only your work, but also your general condition. But only you know it and it is important, and only you are interested in its protection. The employer will find a new person for himself, if that, but you will not find a new yourself.

If you have experience in dealing with stressful situations or working in intensive mode, be sure to share it in the comments. I think it will be useful for many to find out more about what is often left out of brackets.

In conclusion, I want to say that I still was very pleased to work with those people. It was nice and very unusual to receive small verbal bonuses for what I simply considered doing my job. This cultural peculiarity was very contrary to all my previous working experience (it’s somehow not customary in our everyday life to say even such simple things as “good job”). I would like to wish them to start successfully in absentia. Still, formally, the stock option is still mine.

But the long read is the end, who mastered - well done.

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