We need controlled chaos in our jobs
If you face the same situation again and again in your work, you’ll apply the same solution each time. Over time, you’ll lose the ability to handle new situations, just as unused muscles atrophy. In addition to skills, you’ll lose your confidence.
We need the stimulus of new challenges to keep our minds sharp. These let us try new approaches, some of which will work and some won’t. The occasional failures will tell us what didn’t work so that we can try a different approach.
Not only do we need the stimulus of new situations, but some pressure to solve them. Otherwise, we’ll consider it an interesting intellectual exercise and leave it at that. It’s similar to a problem we’re asked in an interview. Given the pressure to solve it in the interview, we take a stab at it. Afterward, we may remember it from time to time but we’ll never get around to solving it. This is no different from how water in a pipe doesn’t flow absent pressure.
That’s why you should work in a startup rather than a big company. You’ll be exposed to more situations every month, and learn faster. A big company has already solved many of its fundamental problems. That’s good for them but bad for you.
Taleb talks about how our body is designed to cope with micro-impacts. Whenever you walk, your foot handles a fall of an inch or so. Repeated thousands of times over the day. But if you jump from a height of 1000 inches at once, which is 25 meters, you’ll die or be severely injured.
Similarly, you want controlled chaos:
You want some time pressure to make you think about creative ways to optimise development, such as reducing scope. Or re-thinking the level of quality that’s appropriate. Some time pressure is good. But early-stage startups have unreasonable timelines, like being asked to do in a fortnight something that takes multiple months. This will only add stress, and makes you feel disappointed when you fail to achieve a target that was impossible to begin with. You don’t want these negative emotions, which build up to a point where you’re hesitant to take on even a possible challenge. People have only a limited amount of ability to absorb pain, and you want to use this emotional budget carefully. Emotions are as precious a resource as financial, manpower or any other kind of resource, though they’re unfortunately often neglected.
Having some amount of skin in the game is good. In a company of 10,000, your contribution has a 0.01% impact on the company, which is not noticeable. Big companies will be around no matter what an individual does, so one is incentivised to focus on growing their career (politics) over what’s good for the company. To prevent this from happening, you want some skin in the game. In a startup of 10, your contribution has a 10% impact, which exerts a healthy pressure on you. But you shouldn’t start a startup1 because you have too much skin in the game. Everything that happens happens at your expense. Humans don’t handle situations of too much stress well. I’ve seen founders get into a mode where they stop learning from their mistakes. Too much stresses causes our minds to shut down, dig in our heels and just keep doing what we’re doing on autopilot. We also have a certain learning rate, a rate at which we can assimilate information. There’s a reason a degree takes four years: you can’t learn everything in four weeks. But early-stage startups amount to forcing you to learn too quickly, which people can’t.
You want some amount of financial stake, such as a promise of a financial reward if the company succeeds 2, or knowing that you’ll lose your job if the company fails. But you don’t want too much financial stake such as accepting a salary below your monthly expenses 3, irregular salary payments, or working without a salary. Or, worse, paying everyone else out of your pocket as a founder, seeing your bank balance deplete by multiple lakhs a month, which is more than you can afford.
You perhaps don’t want too much funding, like $100m, because companies with that much money often waste it. But, at the same time, you don’t want insufficient funding: When you’re afraid your job will disappear, or worrying about when and whether the unpaid salaries from previous months will be paid and how to manage your expenses, you can’t focus on the work and improve at it. It would be like an athlete at a running race worried about broken bottles being thrown at him. That’s not the kind of challenge that’s constructive to a sportsperson.
You perhaps don’t want to work in a situation where every possible expert is available to you, because you’ll tend to lean on them instead of figuring things out yourself. But you don’t want to be completely short-staffed, such as being the only backend engineer in a company that requires eight backend engineers, because you won’t get time to learn anything or do anything properly. Learning requires time and space, and without that, you’re shortchanging yourself. You won’t be better in your next job as a result of the experience.
If you’re an engineer, and there’s no dedicated product manager in your startup, that might be a good opportunity to learn to manage your own work. Or if there’s no designer, to learn UX design, provided a few months are given to you. That’s a healthy amount of chaos. But if you have no PM, designer, marketer, salesperson and HR, and you’re trying to do it all, or trying to learn a new skill in a day, that’s uncontrolled chaos.
If you have some tech debt, that can be a good thing, since it teaches you which coding practices cause problems later 4. But you don’t want tech debt to the point where nothing works — that’s uncontrolled chaos.
It’s okay to have some production emergencies. Every company has them, and they teach you both DevOps and coding practices. But you don’t want multiple emergencies every day, because you’re spending all your time firefighting and none building the product.
It’s okay for one of the features you built, or projects you did, to fail. That’s controlled chaos, helping you learn. But having the startup fail is uncontrolled chaos.
It’s okay for there to be some process problems — that’s controlled chaos. But not for there to be absolutely no agreement on how the company should run, priorities changing all the time, multiple people telling you multiple things to do, no clear prioritisation, and so on — that’s uncontrolled chaos.
It’s okay for people to point out when a decision of yours did not work out. Even though it’s uncomfortable for us to be on the receiving end of such negative personal feedback, it helps us grow — that’s controlled chaos. But not for there to be an environment of constant criticism, grumbling, pointing fingers behind people’s backs, non-cooperation, and so on, conducted in an environment of distrust.
It’s okay to have some of the above problems — that’s controlled chaos, and helps us grow. But not to have most of the above problems — that’s uncontrolled chaos, and not constructive.
Twice
This can be an explicit promise, such as a certain percentage of equity, or an agreement with the founders that you’ll be given a hike if the company reaches the next round of funding. Or the promise can be implicit.
Plus 30% of savings.
Which doesn’t necessarily make them bad practices considering the circumstances. But you want to be aware of which decisions worked out fine over time, and which didn’t.