Tech StartUp work culture issues!!

Most of the startups have following issues which do not look big untill you expand.

• No Test code or very less code is tested using automation tools.
• Almost No or weak documentation and specifications for work to be done or being done on the new feature
• Unstable deployment and deliveries, generally calling it phase wise implementation (wrong methodologies)
• Very less time allocation for every task or feature, by the management and no reality or systematic check at the core of the work.

This are some common issues faced by most of the start-ups or small medium organisation and whole credits goes to the senior management who has failed to teach how to get organized and approach to the problem at hand.

I have seen cases where management is very happy with those who handle the situation quickly but they fail to judge the consequences and after effects of the solution provided. Senior management will talk about proper task management, reports and organizing every thing but do not have any reality check on the work done on the grounds. If you think I am trying to judge others and not talking about the problems on myself as a employee of the organisation, then I would say that these issues are not related to one employee but overall work culture being cultivated by the top management. Junior level or mid level management and others gets shaped as you tell them and the situation happens. Always doing adhoc solutions or quickly taking a shortest path solution will end up in a mess and later you waste more time, money and resources to fix the same old issue.

Let me share you my personal experience with each point I have mentioned above.

1. No Test code or very less test code. Our CEO was a developer himself in his starting days of career. He used to ask for writing test code but didn’t use to give any extra time for it generally, Nevertheless, One day he went in a small and close networking group and met few other startup guys and one of them made a laugh that you have test code in your application, you surely don’t have any funding rounds done yet or else the investors would have killed you by now. That was the day, he started skipping or gave no importance to the test code and now it’s the sole responsibility of the developer to test his code, because nobody else is ever going to catch him untill some issue in the production comes up. Before production deployment it shall be manually tested by few and that’s it, the testers do a black box testing and hardly understand what all is working correctly and what’s need to be tested exactly. So this is a work culture issue imposed by the top management.
2. Documentation Issue, recently I was talking to a new senior level developer who understands that the specifications of task were not clear and he said to me that “Project management tool is being used as a To Do app, hence the work done was incorrect”. I agree to him and understand the depth of it, because I have experience myself the lack of information being provided so many times. A new comer in the company and especially a junior level or a fresher cannot work without being on call for hours for his first few months since there is no documentation which he can refer. Here is there another issue which the industry faces, that is death documentation. Dead documentation refers to old and irrelevant documentation maintenance and creating confusion. So what’s the solution? Documentation is an art and needs to be done correctly and this is achievable with practice and right attitude.
3. Unstable releases and deliverables, what I mean here is lack of planning at the design level/core level. The team needs to plan and design the task so nicely and precisely that even the minimal work done and deploy does not break and works as a ground for the future tasks to be done upon it. CEO names a feature, mid level thinks a solution for it and it goes to developers for implementation. Now the issue is CEO had thought something, solution researcher thinking is slightly different and the developer who implements has a different thinking altogether, so the end results will have lot of difference since there is no design provided, no business logic specified and there is no test code to check whether it’s breaking other things or not.
4. Getting less time to code and deliver is a general issue everywhere, but management doing this every time is a work cultural issue, the implementation is not at the same level of motivation always, no body likes to work in pressure everytime, less time will force the developer to skip things which might be required for the long run, like documentation, clean coding standards, testing it with all scenerio’s etc.

In the start these issues seems to be small and ignoring them seems no big deal – True!, But when the team expands these teasing issues becomes a reality and now changing the work culture is very hard because of many reasons at each employee level.