Readit NewsI have such little patience for this sort of writing. If you are going to claim there are 13 ways to look at something, then put numbers on them and make it a list so it's easier to consume.
Those still involved in Windows desktop, will assert that they are running like headless chickens, no clue which UI framework to invest, downgraded the development experience back to pre-.NET days, no longer hold the golden rule of backwards compatibility, and have teams of a ridiculous tiny size, only capable of bug fixing and very small feature development.
So most likely any employee involved in Windows desktop development, that doesn't drink the Kool Aid of COM/C++, will also not vote with much thrust on their business unit future.
I was wondering what was going on there because Windows is so incredibly bad in so many ways. I need my computer for productivity - not consumption - and Windows really seems good at getting in the way a lot of time. If I could jump back to using a Mac for work I would do it in a heartbeat.
I can’t sell equity in a private company to exchange for goods and services like I can stock that gets deposited in my brokerage account every six months.
Dead Comment
Yes that's basically what happened. I get that this is their perception, but find it funny how much self-awareness is lacking as to what they contributed. I'm still friends with them and still like them, but they are firmly in the camp of "nope" moving forward.
> Maybe they were doing more than you realised, or maybe they were just freeloading.
I'd love for it to be the case where they were doing more than I realized, but considering we're all engineers and I'm the only one working on designs and implementing code...and driving all the discussions...you get the idea.
My co-founders (and business partners), who are the majority shareholder, made it abundantly clear that the company was 'theirs'. They made decisions behind my back although I am the only founder working full time on the company. I felt alienated, undervalued, and frankly quite miserable for a while.
At some point, when this behavioral pattern started affecting other team members and I realized I had nothing left to do, it was time for me to move on.
I tried to write down how I felt, keeping it politically correct.
I tried twice to start software companies with people I knew. Both times the other party didn't invest nearly as much time as I was putting in. And in both cases I figured this out fairly early and started to match their drive and investment into what we were building. As you'd expect, the companies folded within a few months.
What's interesting to me is that one of the guys I'm still friends with and the story he tells for why it folded is very different from my view. To him, it was me backing away and causing it fail and from my experience, it was I switched from working on it 7 days a week to working on it two weekends a month. I don't think he's being mean spirited here - I think he is just that clueless about what was going on.
My current start-up was founded differently. My partner and I did multiple smaller projects together to see if we could work together. We also went through a deep dive on "past traumas" (key life defining moments for us) along with exercises on what sorts of values we want to inject into the company (ranging from how we handle feedback, to how we respond to failure, to what our employees would say about us and the company 2 years in the future, etc.). This allowed us to understand where we are coming from, figure out if our values aligned, and help lean on each other when things got hard/stressful. It really does make navigating building something together. Basically "wtf?!" reactions can easily be replaced with "uh oh, is everything okay?"
This is great but please tell people this upfront. Not everyone has an over abundance of confidence - especially candidates that come from traditionally marginalized communities.