Laid off
All you need is a leap of faith
“I’m more afraid of you not shipping the product than breaking things,” my founder told me. He wasn’t happy that I hadn’t finished my work and went to play ping pong. However, I had finished most of my work, pushing all my code to development environments, just not the last step, pushing it to production.
All in all, my founder and I agreed that we were very slow, given that I had been here for six weeks.
Is it six weeks long? Yes, it is long for a startup that is trying to launch its product. No, it is not for a fresh graduate who just started a career six weeks ago.
The contradictory startup life
Dear weirdos, I’m very sad to tell you that I often feel inadequate. I feel that I am not doing enough even though I work every evening, not caring about any other part of my life. I know I learn much faster compared to all my peers who just graduated because of the environment, but I still feel it is not enough for my work. I feel dumb because I feel like I know nothing, even though I also know I’ve learned an incredible amount in the past 6 weeks. I feel a strong sense of mission and direction in general, but I am also not sure if I am on the right track and at the right pace every day. Funny, right? Everything feels contradictory.
Only today did I realize it is much less about my capability and much more about my mindset, such as ownership.
When it comes to ownership, my manager at Meta commented, “This girl has a really strong sense of ownership and autonomy. Or maybe too much of it.” But now, when it comes to launching the entire product, I flinched.
My founder said, “Everyone else pushes things into production without me noticing.” But for me, the rest of the people are working on some features like buttons; breaking them just breaks a part of the product. But I’m generating the core of our product, content, and images. If mine breaks, EVERYTHING is broken. I don’t want to break their product. Yes, their product, not mine.
DO YOU WANT A NEW FRESH GRAD INTERN TO BREAK YOUR COMPANY?? HUH?
Intuitively, this doesn’t really make sense to me. But the current way I’m handling it on our app, taking every step carefully and allocating my energy to perfecting by testing, testing, and testing my code doesn’t really help either. I say this problem isn’t about capacity, but rather mindset, because it’s about:
Do I initiate a plan for myself or follow instructions from my founder?
Do I prioritize that my production code has no bugs or rather improve the content quality for my user?
Do I ship my code to production or wait for my founder to do it?
Now I follow more instructions because I feel like I know nothing. I prioritize production code because I think it’s more difficult than content. I don’t ship my code because I don’t want to break people’s work. It makes so much sense from my perspective as an intern, but makes no sense for our users.
My founder: “I want to empower you to push your work out.” If he said so, I’ve just got to take a leap of faith and break as many things as possible. Let’s see if I drive him crazy.
What will be the worst-case scenario?
I will be laid off. That sounds scary because it feels humiliating rather than not having money. I do want this experience at least once in my lifetime because it is quite an important learning for my 0-1 muscle.
This startup fails because of me. 99% of startups fail anyway.
But the most important thing is, that no matter if I get laid off or I break the startup, it will not change the direction of my great work. This startup is now on my path to great work, and that’s why I’m here. I’m already on my path and nothing can stop me. With or without my startup, I am committed to this.
So who cares? And I type…
—deploy