On Old Burns and New Beginnings
On Old Burns and New Beginnings
Last week was disgustingly bad, and my stress has skyrocketed because of it. I've got a few things baking, and we'll talk about it toward the end, but first I need a therapeutic rant. Sorry lol.
I. Old Burns
“After May, I can’t guarantee we’ll have any budget allocated for your team.”
Honestly, I really should have seen the signs coming from a mile away. Looking back, they were practically neon. Almost every single person hired on to our exec team in the last few months all have a single common thread: they all have prior experience with selling companies.
The thing that pisses me off the most about this whole situation is that we’ve been consistently told every single week “we’ve hit our sales goals! 🥰 We’ve hit our revenue goals! 🥰 We’re GROWING!! 🥰”, but somehow despite the apparent growth we couldn’t secure the budget for my team.
For the last few years, we’ve been working on this massive project to make our front-end headless. From a business standpoint, it’s one of the best possible things we could do. It allows us to have complete and total control over the flow and function and format of every single aspect of our website, while also having utterly insane levels of speed and performance. On average, we’re running sub-half-second load times everywhere, literally to the point of “blink and you miss it”. And paired with our traffic volume? Every fraction of a second counts.
But for some asinine reason, the company has decided “you know what? No, we don’t want this anymore. Let’s just take the last few years and throw it all away!🥰” So now we’re going to completely torch the project and revert back to having to use multiple domains with multi-second load times, locking us into several bloated and heavy CMS systems, and when that’s done my team is getting the chopping block.
Why? To “cut costs”. (TRANSLATION: “We’re interested in selling the company, so nothing else matters to us other than making sure our costs are as low as possible, even if it means sacrificing user experience and lighting the livelihood of entire teams on fire. Why? Because fuck you, that’s why.”)
After that meeting last Monday, I cycled through the five stages of grief and have reverted back to the anger stage, where I’ve been rapidly boiling nonstop ever since. There hasn’t been a single waking moment after that point where I haven’t been a white hot ball of fury. I’m practically glowing. I’m pretty sure I could power entire countries with the sheer levels of nuclear fucking rage that resides within my veins. Obvious sarcasm, it’s not actually that bad, but boy howdy am I frustrated and stressed and mad.
Like bro. I had to relocate for this shit. I used to have my life (relatively) all together back home. The decision to take the dive into this field when I did meant that I had to effectively start my life over from the beginning.
I’ve been stuck in survival mode for the last week and a half. Almost all of my waking time is dedicated toward looking for new work (I’ve sent in over 100 applications in the span of last week). Fortunately I’ve got a few interviews slated already and had a couple other people reach out to talk further, but nothing solid so far. I have to remind myself that I’m still super early in the job search, but last Monday feels like it was forever ago.
Anyway, lesson learned, I guess. Never gonna do that shit again. “Oh by the way we work in office so you’ll have to relo—” no, shut the fuck up, this job can be done fully remote and you know it, I’m not going to upend and wildly adjust my life for a company that doesn’t give two shits whether I live or die, I CANNOT make that same mistake again. Fuck you. I’ll see you online via Slack first thing Monday morning.
God I hate corporate greed.
Oh, and the funniest thing ever is that despite this project being slated to get thrown into the incinerator in a couple months, the expectation is that we’re going to continue developing said project and progressing it even further. This is the absolute biggest waste of my team’s time, to the point that it feels wildly disrespectful. But what do I know? I just work here.
II. New Beginnings
I began doing freelance work back in 2016, during my restaurant tenure. At the time, it wasn’t under a particular name — it was just me.
At one point, during a fateful November, I joined a coding bootcamp in an effort to sharpen my skills and grow as a developer. This would give me the skillset that I needed to build actual software — not just websites. I decided to set up a Discord server for my fellow student cohort, giving us a place to collaborate, work on projects, leverage eachother’s skills for freelance stuff, study, and just hang out. Of course, the Discord server needed a name, so I decided to combine “November” and “cohort” together. And thus, Novohort was born.
The name’s long since been adopted by my freelancing gig (because let’s be real here, it’s a pretty badass name), but now — considering certain current events in my life — it’s high time to convert this into something more legitimate than just me and a couple of buddies. I’ve built up my systems and procedures over the years, but I’ve never actually formalized or documented any of it, so setting up Novohort properly like this gives me the opportunity to do so.
My number one goal for Novohort is to turn it into a great place to work by focusing on efficiency, developer happiness, and quality of life. Work-life balance is extremely important to me, and so I plan to bake it into our very ethos. As time goes on and our team grows, of course we’ll have to adjust various things in order to better care for the team as a whole, but we’re going to start off with three key things and then build up from there as needed.
Remote Work By Default
Let’s face it, this is 2024. Any company that requires an office presence for a job that can be done 100% remotely is doing nothing but wasting their money to maintain said office. I really don’t care where you work from, because the work gets done either way. I’d much rather you work from where you’re most comfortable.
Four-Day Workweek
Again, this is 2024 — it’s time to leave the past in the past. Fridays, Saturdays, and Sundays are off limits as far as work is concerned. Take that time to recharge. We want you at 100%, only 80% of the time. Not the other way around.Chair Time Is A Stupid Metric
Yet again, this is 2024. The biggest problem with companies that hold their teams to a chair time metric, even if it’s invisible, is that they’re forcing inefficiency. If I have a single task per week that’ll only take me a few hours to accomplish, but I have to be at my desk full-time, then guess what? That single task is going to take up the entirety of my week in order to justify the chair time requirement. Instead, if there’s no requirement (explicit or implicit) that I’m supposed to be desk-chained, then I can just focus on getting the task done. The job is completed more efficiently, the client gets their deliverables sooner, and I can go spend time with my family. Everybody wins.
III. Orders Of Business
Setting up the website. I just wanted to get something up quick in order to maximize potential SEO time. An online presence is critical. It’s missing a couple features (such as a contact form) but that’ll all be hashed out soon enough.
Getting my structures and procedures documented properly, and I’ll have that completed over the coming evenings. Some level of standardization is important in order to maintain efficiency, as it provides a single source of truth for the team as a whole to refer to and to rely on.
Reaching out to my fellow layoffees and gauging their interest in joining as the founding team. We already work together well enough, and we each have some strong opinions that I believe will positively shape the future of Novohort. Plus we can leverage eachother’s varying skillsets to bring new ideas and approaches to the table in a collaborative effort. No worries about doing things a certain way to appease the tech-illiterate shareholders. Just good, clean development practices.
Reaching out to additional colleagues, specifically anybody I know with prior sales experience. We’re gonna need somebody that has the skills needed to help find and source new clients, close out their contracts, and manage their accounts.
Accept collaboration requests from those interested. Team efforts are critical, but we’re going to need an all-hands on deck approach if we plan to get this thing rolling properly. Going into this from the ground up as an emergency means that currently it’s eat-what-you-kill, but I aim to have things running where by year’s end at least one of us will afford to leave their full-time job.
???
7. Stonks.
