I'm not making a grandiose claim that being at a startup is indescribably hard. There are lots of hard jobs.
I've also had executive roles at startups, personally know tons of founders and tons of people that have worked in executive positions at startups and tons of other people that have worked in big tech companies, management consulting firms and investment banks, big law firms and so on. An executive role at a startup is simply not some type of outlier experience from a difficulty perspective. It all comes down to core competencies.
The issue here isn't that Tracy hired someone who doesn't have startup experience, but more that she hired someone who had been removed from day-to-day technical execution for decades, whose core competency at this point was dealing with bureaucratic complexity at a scale that simply didn't exist at her company and expected him to operate effectively at a level where you need to be significantly more hands-on.
This has nothing to do with startup vs big company. If you put this person as a line manager at a big tech company, it wouldn't go so well either. On the other hand, big tech L6/L7 type managers would be perfectly fine in these roles.
Not quite what I'm saying here but a similar perspective:
candybar|3 years ago
I've also had executive roles at startups, personally know tons of founders and tons of people that have worked in executive positions at startups and tons of other people that have worked in big tech companies, management consulting firms and investment banks, big law firms and so on. An executive role at a startup is simply not some type of outlier experience from a difficulty perspective. It all comes down to core competencies.
The issue here isn't that Tracy hired someone who doesn't have startup experience, but more that she hired someone who had been removed from day-to-day technical execution for decades, whose core competency at this point was dealing with bureaucratic complexity at a scale that simply didn't exist at her company and expected him to operate effectively at a level where you need to be significantly more hands-on.
This has nothing to do with startup vs big company. If you put this person as a line manager at a big tech company, it wouldn't go so well either. On the other hand, big tech L6/L7 type managers would be perfectly fine in these roles.
Not quite what I'm saying here but a similar perspective:
https://a16z.com/2010/04/21/why-is-it-hard-to-bring-big-comp...