
Get Shit Done: The Worst Startup Culture - hunckler
http://whatspinksthinks.com/2013/11/04/get-shit-done-the-worst-startup-culture-ever/
======
jaegerpicker
Dear God this was my life at a past employer. The biggest issue is that Get
Shit Done usually turns to Get Shit Done exactly how I want even though I
won't tell you what it is because I'm "Getting Shit Done!". I know better now.
If I see that at an interview now, I'll run, not walk, run away. People bitch
about how hard it is to find good developers and yet hire talented developers
but put them in shitty positions. Then bitch about them not being good enough.
It's like buying a sports car and putting shitty watered down gas in it and
complaining about how the car doesn't perform like it should.

~~~
7Figures2Commas
> People bitch about how hard it is to find good developers and yet hire
> talented developers but put them in shitty positions.

Notwithstanding the fact that the GSD mentality _is_ often nonsense that comes
from folks who don't know what they're doing, I would make the point that _a
lot_ of software jobs are "shitty" in the context of what many expect to find
when they decide to become a developer. And that's life.

Even at many of the biggest names in tech, a lot of developers are performing
mundane tasks that are not nearly as interesting or sexy as one would imagine.
If even the biggest companies in tech, which deal with some of the biggest
problems, can't create more "good" positions than "shitty" ones, it shouldn't
come as a surprise that smaller companies and startups can't either.

Incidentally, it's like this in just about every profession that is glamorized
in some fashion (i.e. investment banking, law, etc.).

~~~
AsymetricCom
"That's life" what a load... no, that's a corporate job which doesn't give a
shit about you. It's not really life.

The only reason people put up with it is because they're told "that's life" or
"that's just how it is." when that's meaningless bullshit.

~~~
nostrademons
Why would you expect a corporate job to give a shit about you? It's not a
person (regardless of what the Supreme Court says...), it doesn't have
feelings.

Your parents love you unconditionally. If you want anyone else to care about
you, you have to make it happen through your actions.

~~~
HarryHirsch
_Why would you expect a corporate job to give a shit about you?_

Why would I expect the company to treat me decently? Why _do_ I expect the
company to treat me decently? It's because people do not only have rights,
they have duties towards their fellow man, that's why!

This is a long-standing idea in German political thought - it's called
_Sozialpflichtigkeit des Eigentums_ , and it made its way into both the Weimar
and present constitution. "Eigentum verpflichtet", it says there. Americans
have a hard time understanding this.

~~~
ForHackernews
> they have duties towards their fellow man, that's why!

That's exactly what he's saying. It's a company, not a person. You are not its
"fellow man"\--because it's not a man. It's a legal structure that exists to
generate profit.

~~~
nostrademons
Yeah.

It's not unreasonable to expect your boss to treat you decently, at least if
you treat her decently. She's a person, after all.

But the corporation as a whole? The corporation is a system. It responds to
the environment around it. If it doesn't make the right response (as in one
that maximizes its chance of survival), it is replaced by other corporations
that do. That right response may be at odds with your interests as a person.

You, your boss, your boss's boss, and all your coworkers are part of that
system. If _they_ don't take the "right" action (as in, the one that maximizes
their chance of survival within the organization), they will be replaced by
others who do. If you feel you've been mistreated by this, your only option is
to look for a _different_ place in that system where you will be happier.

It's a two-way street. It's not just that people should refrain from treating
you poorly, it's also that you shouldn't put yourself in a position where you
will be treated poorly.

~~~
chii
The documentary "The Corporation" actually illustrates this point quite well.
The psychological profile of a corporation is one of a sociopath, hell bent on
making profit, at the disregard of all else.

Don't be loyal to a corporation, don't buy into propaganda about the well-
being of the corporation == your well-being.

------
gorbachev
I think I have a different definition of get shit done than this blog post
describes.

To me getting shit done means actually getting your work done. It means you
don't read Hacker News all day long (oops) and send cute cat pictures to the
entire office every hour. It doesn't mean you take every possible shortcut and
hacky workaround to save a few hours of implementation time.

However, sometimes (and ONLY sometimes) that's what you are going to have to
do. Just make sure you fix it later. If you do that all the time, it's going
to blow up on your hands sooner or later (or on the hands of the poor schmuck
they hire to work on it long after you're gone).

I work for a startup getting pressured by several BIG competitors that have
all the advantages (client base, billions in the bank, established brand
names, etc.), so we're under a tremendous pressure to "get shit done". There
have been times (actually, I think only one time) when the right call was to
get shit done in the wrong way of the phrase. We fixed it later. The core of
the solution was solid, though.

We've also been unlucky to hire people who do NOT get shit done. It's like
they have some sort of perpetual procrastination engine built in their brains.
No amount of planning or iterating worked. Shit just wasn't getting done in
any way, poorly or excellently. If you can't decide what approach to take,
just pick ONE and move forward. Chances are you'll learn something along the
way to validate or invalidate your approach, and you can then adjust.

------
api
I said this a while back in another thread, but it's actually more on-topic
here:

One of the worst things about tech culture is that it's full of socially
awkward people who have learned a neat low-effort hack for getting around
their poor social skills: be an asshole.

Being an asshole is easy. It requires no actual effort spent in learning the
intricacies of human social interaction or human nature. It requires no effort
spent getting "outside your own head," trying to connect with other people,
investing in forming genuine bonds or understanding the motivation of others.
All you have to do is learn to at least feign confidence, to be superficially
charming, and to throw your weight around.

The tricks of the asshole trade are status symbols, name dropping, rank-
pulling, appeals to credentials (I went to Stanford so I am better than you),
fast talking, claiming you have "no time" for anyone who doesn't kowtow to
your superior assholery, etc.

Like many low-effort hacks it "works" in the sense that it creates a
superficial sense of social proficiency and permits the user to navigate
meatspace. Sometimes you can even get things done. But it's a cheap trick and
it doesn't scale forward either in size, scope, or time.

~~~
RogerL
This has nothing to do with tech, IMO. Wander over to Wall Street, go into
some white collar office with a bunch of people doing data entry, go to some
fulfillment center warehouse, and then go to a construction site and you'll
see the same behavior.

Managing people is not trivial. So, to bring tech into it, it really boggles
my mind when I see these awful styles. I mean, we spend years developing our
skills, and break our arms patting ourselves on our back on how skilled we
are. Then, for whatever reason, we end up on the people side and suddenly
making it up as you go is fine. We have books on managing people - they are
not a panacea, but I'm shocked at how few people in these positions have heard
of them, let alone read them.

For example, the Microsoft Press books form the 90s are great. _Debugging the
Development Process_ , _Software Project Survival Guide_ , _Writing Solid
Code_ , _Rapid Development_ , and then books like _The Mythical Man-Month_ ,
and _Peopleware_. Just a passing familiarity is all I ask. But no. Favored
people and 'can't be hit by a bus' people get away with anything, great people
with a few rough edges get fired at whim, no guiding principles on what it
takes to execute a project (get shit done doesn't count, sorry), no concept of
personal development. Ugh.

~~~
dmajoraddnine
What I find particularly interesting about this is that, as technology creeps
further and further into the mainstream, we're going to need more people
writing/maintaining software. And they're likely going to be from the fatter
part of the bell curve w/r/t skill (or else wouldn't they have become
interested in software anyway?). So will it get easier or harder to manage
coders when the average ability level moves toward the mean?

------
gjm11
If your only goal is to get shit done, then too much of what you get done will
be shit.

~~~
coldcode
People who routinely work long hours usually wind up generating more shit than
work.

------
freshhawk
In my experience GSD is just an excuse to avoid the organization and planning
work that's not particularly interesting compared to banging out some code.

I've seen _a lot_ of startups just failing utterly because their primary
philosophy is this one, and it tells them that it's ok to skip the hard/boring
parts of your duties.

On the plus side those who are thinking through their experiments and still
failing fast but intelligently choosing what they are trying rather than just
skipping the planning and hammering out some code can really out-compete their
GSD'ing competition. I have some good friends doing exactly this and doing it
very consciously right now (just yesterday I told them they should call it
Hammock Driven Biz Dez since we are all Rich Hickey fans). It is working very
well, and that's measured in revenue.

~~~
perlpimp
Last company I worked at, we were doing planning for 2 years and have yet to
ship a product. There is something to be said for GSD, but only for startups
in teams of under 10. Why? - because shipping a product gives you something to
look forward to, live product is something you can brag about show and change
the world with. It is better to ship than not to ship. If you can't do it in 2
months - cut features out, etc etc.

If you have razor sharp focus and most people are apt in their roles and know
what to do without looking up to a central person - thats called teamwork.
However when you get to point when you start getting less focused and start
looking for a new target, things got to get reorganized, thats when GSD is
useless. When realigning troops you got to give some wiggle room instead of
blindingly forging ahead, maybe off the cliff. When you hire more people -
grow beyond original team - GSD can be a bit hard to deal with and frankly
destructive on the whole to the growth of a company.

It is never easy.

my 2c.

~~~
freshhawk
Yes, obviously over-analysis/over-engineering is also bad but I'm not sure why
that provides any evidence that doing none is good.

It is definitely not impossible to fail fast and emphasize MVPs and shipping
while still being highly organized. People do it all the time, and they
produce _way_ more useful features than the GSD'ers because they are
organized. And by the time they've been working for a few months they are
moving faster than the GSD'ers (in my experience anyway, the actual timespan
probably depends on how complex the problem is).

Maybe we aren't agreeing on what exactly GSD is? Because even on tiny projects
where you come up with an idea and ship an MVP a week later I've abandoned the
GSD style blind flailing. I spend maybe 5% of that week thinking about it and
planning a few things out, altering that plan as you build it and another
maybe 10% keeping technical debt low. That thinking time saves at least a few
dead ends that I would have otherwise gone down. The low tech debt makes
debugging easier throughout the entire rest of the 85%.

That 15% investment has never not seemed to pay off. Not so far. And then on
week two, when there's feedback and it's time to iterate you are sitting
pretty, not starting from scratch and just winging it some more like you would
be with the GSD strategy. I've done both, and I really can't emphasize enough
how much of a payoff there is to keeping lightweight, flexible but mandatory
process in place. Always.

GSD style cowboy development is something I kick myself for wasting so much
time with when I was younger, and it is totally natural to fall into that
style when you like writing coding and are lazy.

Sorry, that was quite the wall of text, I guess that's my 4c.

------
smacktoward
Is this an actual thing? Are there really people out there who think running
around yelling "Get Shit Done!" constitutes actual project management?

We are doomed.

~~~
RogerL
Sure. Friday on LinkedIn I got one of those "recommended jobs" thingies in my
story line. It was full of "you should value execution over planning". It
pretty much sounded like a 20hr/day sweatshop of fighting endless bugs and
chasing the whims of the founders.

Are the VCs listening to this? You are funding people who don't take spending
your money very seriously. There is a huge continuum (shall I say gulf)
between not over-engineering something when you don't yet have proven market
share and just randomly tossing shit together.

~~~
api
_" you should value execution over planning"._

People who hold to this philosophy should practice it while driving. This
would reduce the number of people who hold this philosophy.

~~~
ikura
Or at least reduce the number that arrive at their intended destination...

------
UK-AL
The whole start-up culture encourages this behaviour. The current fire fast
trend, rather than trying find the root cause for example.

Firing someone can completely mess up someones career, but people are being
told to fire someone on a whim, if they're not right fit(I mean that could be
anything). Turn it around, and put yourself in their shoes.

~~~
api
I experienced "fire fast" on the receiving end once. It's the one and only
time I've been let go for any cause from a job. It occurred at a shall remain
unnamed big startup on the East Coast.

I was hired on the merit of my portfolio and past positions (I do not have a
high-snob-factor college degree), and dove in and got up to speed pretty
quick. Job was to implement a lot of Java code and some .NET for a major web-
based marketing product. Management was completely by the book Scrum,
including actual use of terms like "pigs" and "chickens" and such. I roll my
eyes at that kind of thing, but I don't really mind and can just roll with it.
It's by no means the worst "management design pattern" you could use.

The place had a superficially awesome culture, even had a foosball table. Roll
eyes a little again, but who cares if it's startup-cliche. It actually is fun
so again roll with it. Communication in the team feels good, stuff is actually
getting done, etc. One person is a bit of a dick but everyone else seems cool.
Nice view from the common office window. I feel pretty good about this job so
far.

My first and only real hint that anything is amiss is that the code I am
tasked with working on is shite. I mean hacky, ugly, uncommented, generally
nasty-ass crufty Rube Goldberg machine Java code that takes over a gigabyte of
RAM to do trivial things that ought to take under a hundred megs. It's also
uninstallable. Just try running it in a dev environment. Seriously. Just try.

I had obviously been given the bastard child of a Red Bull fueled late night
coding binge to untangle. That's cool. I'm on it.

My task, should I choose to accept it, was to add a few features to the
product and fix a list of several bugs.

Problem #1: this code was so badly written it was incapable of handling the
load of current customer demand. Short term solution #1: fire up more EC2
instances. I calculated that for this product alone they were spending almost
1/4 of my salary on EC2 compute instances to compensate for the code's general
clunkiness. To do something that ought to be able to be done on a Pentium-4
with a gig of RAM they were running enough EC2 compute nodes to do protein
folding on a complete genome.

Problem #2: the code was full of static, global, mutable state. This meant
that the easy way of reducing overhead by parallelizing things was an exercise
in banging one's head on the table.

I am told this needs to be done. I start feeling as if I'm getting pressure.
Sprint is coming to an end soon. Everything I do fixes this or that problem
but the boat anchor continues to suck so bad my demonstrations and tests fail
simply on sheer bloat. Fucking nasty-ass sack of crap is so bloated I can't
even properly test it on my dev workstation.

Fuck it. All weekend coding spree time. I am going to -- wait for it --
rewrite the core.

I stay up late all weekend at home doing this, coding furiously, and by Monday
end up with a functional core of this product that does the same thing the old
one did but used ridiculously less resources. The old version took many EC2
nodes to do what it did, while the new version does the same thing on less
than 512mb of RAM on my Macbook and does it in a fraction of the time. Coffee
has now supplanted hemoglobin as a principal oxygen/CO2 carrier in my
bloodstream.

Unfortunately I'm going to have to spend a bit longer to get things done by
the end of sprint on Tuesday, but never fear. I have cleared my schedule and
plan to stay at the office until all sprint tasks are completed, which should
now be do-able without wrestling a greased shoggoth.

The meeting is awkward though. I show this to people and I have a strong sense
that something is wrong. Later that day I'm called into the office and told
I'm being let go, though with a bit of a severance (??? not sure why but I'll
take it).

Why?

(1) Performance doesn't matter. Don't I know anything? "Premature optimization
is the root of all evil," even if said optimization saves 1/4 of my salary in
compute costs and makes the product instantly responsive.

(2) "We don't want to maintain all this new code you wrote" \-- but it was
less than the old code, I argue, and the old code was... never mind.

(3) My favorite: apparently what I did was "not agile," and I would be "better
suited for a research position."

~~~
UK-AL
Sounds like a Daily WTF, but it's also very common.

Its seems most companies don't realise the easiest way to move fast, is a
extensible, easy to change/understand code base. And not going through
spaghetti code with a fine tooth comb. Odd they recommended research, they
only care about one off prototypes.

The problem is future employers assume your the problem.

Btw, Proper scrum/agile encourages people to refactor and keep technical debt
down.

~~~
api
Luckily this engagement was so short, and followed after a period of
independent consulting, that I was able to be only _slightly_ dishonest and
call it a short-term consulting gig.

Thing that pissed me off the most was that I was proud of this code. It was
elegant asynchronous java.nio-based stuff that used something like 1/100th the
RAM and brought the product's response time down from a several hours "we'll
get back to you" to less than a minute for small customer sites. It could also
run the entire product on one EC2 compute node instead of like a dozen. I also
commented it thoroughly and wrote a design document to hand to other
developers describing exactly how its central queue based async architecture
worked. Every method had a complete JavaDoc comment including the method's
"contract," etc.

It's actually some of the cleaner code I've written. Not the thing I'm most
proud of, but probably on the top ten.

Didn't have full unit tests yet, but could have done that in a day or so
easily.

The second thing that pissed me off was this: I have a _strong_ suspicion
based on circumstantial evidence that the fact that my college degree is from
a po-dunk Midwestern school had something to do with it. I have a strong
suspicion that what I did would have been brilliant if I'd gone to a top-ten
university. The founder apparently had such a hard-on for top-ten talent that
he wrote about making sure candidates were from "the right schools" repeatedly
on his blog, and I got the sense from the get-go that he was skeptical of my
hire.

Whatever. My career is looking good and I can probably code the guy under the
table so :P

~~~
bonestamp2
> The founder apparently had such a hard-on for top-ten talent that he wrote
> about making sure candidates were from "the right schools" repeatedly on his
> blog, and I got the sense from the get-go that he was skeptical of my hire.

Fuck these people. I have a fancy degree and I work with better programmers
who never even went to college.

I work for a client that is very scrumy and I did a huge rewrite/refactor
similar to you one week, although probably smaller considering I also
delivered the other tasks expected for the sprint. Nobody even cared that the
rewrite made the product 10x faster. Nobody cared! But they were ecstatic
about other lame changes that were assigned.

I think it's because management didn't ask for it to run faster, but they did
ask for the other things.

The next week I got asked to find out what my changes broke because the app is
behaving so much quicker. I had to remind them that I rewrote the slow part
and there's nothing wrong. Still, nobody was excited... except me, because now
it was a lot easier to develop with because it was faster and easier to debug.

------
JumpCrisscross
" _Everyone has the potential to be productive or unproductive. There aren’t
people who are A players and C players. Just people who are performing at an A
level and at a C level._ "

But some people will go from 0 to A faster and with less assistance than
others _within the scope_ of a specific set of tasks for which they have
innate talent or relateable experience.

Further, if the skill set demanded is fungible it is cheaper to buy talent
than build it in-house. Firing a C to hire an A is better business than hiring
a C and expending time and energy to increase the probability of them
converting to an A at some unknown point in the future _provided that_ there
is a ready supply of As (or Bs) on the market. With regards to entry and mid-
level programming positions, that appears to be the case.

~~~
mattgreenrocks
Unfortunately, it's difficult to evaluate the _quality_ of the work that you
will undertake as a developer from the outside. This leads to tons of
employers with C-quality work clamoring for A-quality individuals when they
could find a B-quality candidate much easier.

How much of 'business' is predicated on this zero-sum mentality? It's all very
tiring. You don't need the best; you just need good enough.

~~~
JumpCrisscross
" _How much of 'business' is predicated on this zero-sum mentality?_"

This is a problem of asymmetric information, i.e. employees generally knowing
themselves better than prospective employers, and wide uncertainty bands
around the evaluation of prospective employees. A rational employer retains a
C over replacing them with an expected B who might be an A or an F.

------
phamilton
GSD for us is less of a management tactic and more of a trait we find in
engineers. Some engineers spend too much time in the design phase, planning
out features nobody is going to use. GSD is about finding the fastest route to
a solution. The quality of the solution is orthogonal to GSD. Bad GSD results
in spaghetti code. Good GSD means providing the minimal solution without
painting ourselves into a corner. It means a clean interface and set of
behavioral tests with perhaps a hackish library implementation that can be
pushed to production. Building out that hack vs taking the time to "do it
right" can mean 10s or 100s of thousands of dollars of revenue. Sure it builds
up a bit of tech debt (which we resource immediately), but that's often well
worth it.

------
cwilson
The only way this "strategy" works is if a few things are already happening:

1\. Communication is already really good

2\. You have a basic plan in place, milestones laid out, and because of #1
being good you're ready to handle anything that doesn't go to plan (because
things definitely won't)

3\. If you have a plan in place you better have discovered some hint of
product-market-fit (figured out who your customers are, what pain point they
have, and how you think you can solve it) that the plan is based around

If you have those things in line, there isn't anything wrong with "get shit
done!" (which I really take to mean less meetings, less screwing around over-
planning, etc). This mentality or strategy backfires when you are missing a
few items from my list, or you have bad managers / founders who don't
understand the importance of the list.

~~~
omnisci
Agreed, there is nothing wrong with GSD as long as it's organized. I see this
in science all the time, "I'm too busy to show you how to do something, just
GSD!". That ends up meaning: 1\. GSD 2\. Do it again, it wasn't done right 3\.
Do it again, because it still wasn't done right (repeat 2 & 3 a few times
over) 4\. .... 5\. Profit! This would be more effective if they followed what
you posted, then said "GSD". Communication, planning and proper support are
critical and without them, you aren't getting shit done, you are getting SHIT
done (and wasting time). Plan quickly, train quickly and throughly, then get
shit done effectively. GSDE would be a better mantra.

------
Spooky23
It's like anything else, if taken to an extreme, you can make anything bad.

The inspiration of "get shit done" are the bureaucratic nightmare environments
where the mundane and irrelevant are debated for weeks, months or years, and
many people make careers out of coming up with excuses why things cannot,
should not, or will not get done.

Some not-so-good managers with poor leadership ability turn this into a power
trip. I'll tell people to "shut up and get shit done" when I sit through a
meeting that's nothing about debating things that aren't important, or just
travelling down rabbit holes with no way out. And I don't deliver that message
in an offensive or nasty way.

------
speg
We just got a bunch of "startup vitamins" at our new office. My "favourite" is
"Fuck it. Ship it."

Hmm, this doesn't pass tests? You didn't run the tests? It breaks something
else? Fuck it, ship it. So now when support comes and asks why everything is
broken, I just point to the sign.

~~~
ams6110
See: healthcare.gov

------
bluedino
I think the author is missing one of the points of 'get shit done', which is
instead of debating whether you should use Go/PHP/node, just fucking do it.
Instead of agonizing over a design choice, just make the damn thing and tweak
it later. Don't over-engineer things.

~~~
danielrhodes
This can't be overstated enough. Just getting started on the problem is half
the battle. Choosing a naive solution is fine since a) you can improve it
later, but with better more actionable knowledge b) it is very difficult
starting a complex project from scratch, so you might as well just start
somewhere.

------
jayhuang
I couldn't help but feel that this was a blog post that I've been meaning to
write for a while.

This, mixed with "beer culture", and measuring productivity based on hours
sitting in the office as opposed to features produced/bugs fixed. Complete
disregard for security vulnerabilities that may put our users at risk because
"we don't have time for that shit", issues of "you are not 100% committed"
when you leave on time one day because your mother is terribly sick. Stalking
your LinkedIn then making a huge fuss about it when it clearly hasn't been
updated in a long time, adding the fact that you have a website to not "100%
committed", etc.

Guess it's time to finally go write that blog post.

------
jroseattle
Anyone who has endured more than one startup will tell you GSD is a bullshit
line. The _only_ people who ever mention this are those who usually have not
been in a position of control to execute (usually because they worked at
BigCo, Inc.) and are now free of those constraints. It's the occupational
equivalent of moving out of Mom & Dad's house and getting your own place.

GSD, when first brought up, was about the fact that startups needed to not
over-analyze and move to do things simply. And, if you moved quickly, simple
solutions would follow. Or so the thinking went.

But the goal was lost in translation, and now GSD looks like something that
should die along with other awesome concepts such as bro-gramming.

------
ghobs91
I won't call what we're in a "bubble", but the culture seems to be going in
the direction of mass producing startups, and this is the result. I see many
startups popping up that seem to be creating a product just for the sake of
creating a product, with no real long term goals.

Some VCs seem to be encouraging it, throwing millions at redundant social
network apps that do things like "Gamify brushing your teeth!".

The tech industry has an immense ability to "make the world suck less" as
Alexis Ohanian puts it, and it's important that we focus on that.

------
steven777400
I'll put in a plug for Roy Osherove's "Notes to a Software Team Leader" which
discusses some of these issues and how to deal with them. It especially deals
with how to handle "overload" and the feeling of falling behind and the
decreased productivity that can bring a team.

------
dmitrygr
These sorts of generalizations do not end well. For example, if you really
think that "There aren’t people who are A players and C players. Just people
who are performing at an A level and at a C level." then fire your entire
recruiting department and hire anyone who walks in through the door. After
all, there are no bad people, only those who perform badly right? So if those
strangers who walk in do not do well, it is the fault of your environment and
management, right?

------
ChikkaChiChi
If you are taking your management cues from a slogan on a wall, you're
probably dealing with shitty management.

~~~
pvdm
From my recollection, the slogan can be attributed to Zuckerberg.

~~~
bmm6o
There's a difference between the company who wrote it on the wall and the
company who read it from the wall. There's surely more to "The Facebook Way"
than 3 words can convey.

------
brianbarker
I used to say "Get Shit Done" to my team, but for a different reason. That
company I was at then is (still) so bogged down in meetings, changes,
planning, etc that nobody ever had more than a few minutes to code without
hours of interruptions.

So, different scenario but I get the post's point.

------
lectrick
It's already down (it's the database... why does it always gotta be the
database... sigh. Actually, it's probably a blog post so why is it even
hitting the database to begin with instead of being served from cache?)

I guess someone didn't prioritize "getting shit done" haha

~~~
davidspinks
Sorry about that, should be better now, replaced the broken caching plugin
with w3edge.

~~~
throwaway1979
Don't feel bad about the crash. My wp blog also crashed the first time I got
to the top of hacker news. You will learn a lot making sure that won't ever
happen gain ;) Caching is going to get you through this one but checkout c10k.

Great post, btw!

------
shadowOfShadow
What are you working on? / The shit. How much longer? / Not much. Almost done.
Is it hot? / It IS shit. Is it tight? / It's DONE. Awesome. Can I blog about
it? / Yeah... you're the CEO. Later... Hey - this is a pile of shit! / It IS
done.

You're a cog in someone else's machine. You are a means to an end - which is
some form of naive auto-fellating bullshit. Shut up and get the shit done.
Someone wants to disrupt the treehouse club!

Treat me mean. I need the money.

Maybe they should A/B the color of their log in finding the A players.

------
danso
I'm nervous to think that "get shit done" is likely the current mantra of
Healthcare.gov, as contractors are scrambling to fix an untested spaghetti-
codebase before Thanksgiving....

------
analog31
The fallacy of "just" should be added to the standard lists of logical
fallacies. "Just do X" assertions are problematic in a number of ways:

1\. "Just" carries a hidden assumption, that the thing is simple and
straightforward.

2\. It's awkward to respond without tacitly accepting the burden of proof for
why you can't do the thing.

------
PMan74
> There aren’t people who are A players and C players. Just people who are
> performing at an A level and at a C level.

That sounds very nice, like something Barney the Dinosaur would say. People
who consistently perform at C level are C players. Maybe they would be A
players doing something different but that's not much use to you.

~~~
UK-AL
Of course they are. Get them doing that other thing they are good at. People
naturally gravitate to tasks they are good at. Are they're any tasks they are
voluntary doing? Is there a full-time position for this?

------
mirozoo
Great post, David! You especially nailed it with the paragraph about
disciplined routines and productive habits. In retrospect, we'd wasted more
than 10 years in our company by just getting shit done. Our solution to this
problem was to keep a simple "logbook" to regularly record and reflect our
achievements and experiences in a team context. (We released a public version
of our internal logbook tool called "teamspir.it" a couple of months ago.) I
must admit that it was damn hard to convince all of our team members that it
is really important to write regularly. Even today most of the people I talk
about this habit ask "Why the hell should I do that? I know what I've done, no
need to write it down...". There are several good approaches for answers to
this question in your post!

------
davidspinks
Sorry about the server issues.

Cached version: [http://cc.bingj.com/cache.aspx?&d=760352947104&mkt=en-
US&set...](http://cc.bingj.com/cache.aspx?&d=760352947104&mkt=en-
US&setlang=en-US&w=sC04SOfAJwkhmsiOww3uGSEad-yAAxny)

~~~
jtheory
"Could not find the requested document in the cache."

This worked for me:

[http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:http://...](http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:http://whatspinksthinks.com/2013/11/04/get-
shit-done-the-worst-startup-culture-ever/)

------
RougeFemme
As the manager/co-founder, helping with tools, coping mechanisms, etc. is
often not enough. When an employee has shit falling off of his/her plate, he
often needs help prioritization. Managers/co-founders often _assume_ everyone
knows the priorities of projects and that's often not the case. If the
manager's or company's priorities have shifted, that needs to be communicated
to everyone. If you have a meeting scheduled with some big-wig tomorrowand I'm
providing data for that meeting, I need to know; otherwise you may not get
your S until it's too late. But, by God, I'm GSD!!

------
colingrussing
"Get Shit Done" is completely different than the other ideas lumped in here,
ie "ship something", "fail often" etc. Many people may mistakenly apply these
concepts in such a way, but it is not inherent.

------
jenskanis
The assumption made in this article is that startups with the "get shit done"
mantra only say to "get shit done" when you're not performing. I feel like the
entire article is based on a bad assumption..

------
Xyik
This isn't really a problem with startups but people in general. The average
person just isn't very empathetic, and especially so when you you're focused
and stressed out working around the clock during a startups early stages of
life. Also: if you were a CEO or manager what incentive is there to try and
dig deeper into why someone is unhappy with their job? Most of the time, its
not fixable, and interviews are there to help filter out individuals who
aren't a good fit both on a technical and personal scale. Now, if all of your
employees are unhappy thats a different problem.

------
anonymous
Kind of offtopic, but it really grinds my gears when a site is perfectly
functional without javascript, but then it has a noscript element blocking you
from reading it. I know how to hide the noscript element. Even if it's not a
noscript element, I know how to delete it from the DOM tree. Why would a site
writer purposefully block people with js disabled from viewing their site?
It's not like you can accidentally disable js in a browser, if it's off, it's
off because I went out of my way to turn it off. And I can hide your opaque
fullpage div just fine.

------
300bps
Another site reporting "Error establishing a database connection". For anyone
posting blog entries telling people that they are doing things wrong, it
really destroys your credibility when you can't set up a server that continues
to function with a moderate amount of traffic.

Mirror:

[http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?output=search&s...](http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?output=search&sclient=psy-
ab&q=cache%3Ahttp%3A%2F%2Fwhatspinksthinks.com%2F2013%2F11%2F04%2Fget-shit-
done-the-worst-startup-culture-ever%2F)

~~~
talmand
You are assuming that the person who wrote the article is in charge of the
server.

~~~
lotyrin
Possibly not directly, but at least indirectly (by choosing where they're
hosted).

~~~
talmand
You are assuming that everyone that has a website and/or blog knows what we're
talking about.

------
wil421
Glad I didnt take my first offer out of school. This was exactly what that
company was about. I knew classmates who took the jobs but left before 6
months.

They were paying 15-20% more for _some_ positions, now I know why. Their motto
was hire and fire, most managers were with them for less than 1.5 years and
promoted because they were most senior after about year.

------
cmac2992
I think you interpret "get shit done" different than I do. Not trying to put
words in your mouth, but I think you interpret as get this product out ASAP. I
think of it as take responsibility for yourself, if you need a break, take a
break. Whatever you need to do to "get shit done", do it.

------
badman_ting
I agree in that "Get shit done" shouldn't be a culture but a goal. It should
be a reminder that, after all your pontificating about monads or whatever,
nobody but you cares about that shit and you need to produce things that they
_do_ care about.

------
dasil003
Get Shit Done is a value, not a management tactic. If managers are considering
it as a management tactic then they are utterly incompetent as described in
the article, however I hope and believe that's it's a strawman and this
practice is not widespread.

------
vinceguidry
No, there are definitely C players. People who, if you give them all the
advantages in the world, will still be completely unable to perform at the
expected level. It's perfectly possible for an A player to perform at a C
level, but not the other way around.

------
djmollusk
Kind of depends on how you interpret it. Many developers over think and
feature creep. When I see Get Shit Done I'm thinking about doing what needs to
be done now instead of working on solutions to problems that haven't happened
yet.

------
chetanahuja
I was thinking of writing a longer comment but I have to get back to getting
shit done.

------
Mikeb85
I think GSD is most appropriate for the earliest stages of a startup (ie. few
to no employees), where you really do need to just get a working product.

Obviously middle managers screaming this mantra at paid employees is silly...

------
alinspired
What's your experience with larger multi-layer structures, as if someone up
the chain is pushing GSD, there is less opportunity to fix this downstream,
leaving people to constant stress.

------
martincmartin
Tripadvisor's slogan is "Speed Wins," which seems like it would translate into
"rarely pay down technical debt." It's always put me off of working there.

~~~
tieTYT
But if you rarely pay down technical debt you'll go slower. So maybe "Speed
Wins" means they do pay down technical debt. Just playing the devil's
advocate.

------
snambi
"Getting Shit Done" will result in exactly that : Shit

------
shitgoose
"what a good manager does is help this person identify the things that are
causing them to be unproductive.

They’ll help them develop new habits and encourage them in their efforts to
adopt them.

They’ll force them to take a step back and see the bigger picture.

They’ll work together to build new systems that will help them be successful.

Shit, at the very least they’ll recommend a good self help book."

Are you serious??? With all due respect, if you are not capable of developing
new habits, stepping back and looking at bigger picture or (sigh) reading a
good self help book _on your own_ without someone holding your hand, then you
have a problem. Wake up my friend and GET SHIT DONE!

------
mnbvcxza
Can anyone compare a GSD culture to a ROWE culture? I haven't seen 'ROWE'
lately.

------
davidspinks
Site should be performing better now. W3edge helped with caching. Thanks for
reading.

------
peacewise
So I wonder, what is the percentage of YC companies that match this profile?

------
tsopi
"Does this situation feel familiar?"

 _cough_... YES!

------
twanlass
+1 for a static jekyll blog :)

------
untilHellbanned
the powerful people know better...they get other people to get their shit done

------
mufumbo
great post david!

------
dschiptsov
Yeah, yeah, stick to your Eclipse and get shit done - exactly a Java sweatshop
paradigm.

Now this Java shit is about to hit the fan.

------
mrwnmonm
Error establishing a database connection

~~~
mrwnmonm
why i got -1 points?

------
jheriko
I can't read this. Maybe you should get shit done... like a working website
¬_¬

~~~
davidspinks
Working on the server issues. Unfortunately FatCow is slow to fix. I wasn't
expecting to be on HN today (=

~~~
jheriko
no prob. sorry for the heavy stab. i'm a big advocate of getting shit done - i
prejudged your argument as invalid before seeing it. :)

having now read the article you have a valid point. there is a real problem
with the idea that people can be hired and left to autonomously work - its
ignoring literally thousands of years of experience we have with leadership
and its value.

i've had this exact same problem myself. its really quite difficult and
offensive it seems to tell your boss 'please provide some leadership and
management - its your job, /you/ need to get shit done before i can do
mine...'. the best solution it seems is to not have to be in that position.

fortunately my current 'boss' always takes the approach of 'what am i doing
wrong?' rather than 'why is he dicking me over?'

