Achieving a Work Life Balance at an Internet Startup
To quote Luke… “You ask the impossible”. Although making your boss at work and your family at home happy may not be as difficult as lifting an x-wing fighter out of a murky Degobah swamp with nothing more than your thoughts, it is still quite the challenge.
Everyone wants more. Your family wants more of you. Your board of directories want more. Your employees and co-workes want more. No one is ever happy with the amount of time you are able to devote to them.
A manager at a startup should expect to work 50 to 60 hours a week. Find an amount within that range that is sustainable, and try to stick to this. I find that I can do 10 hours a day during the week, and 5 hours over the weekend. So to get your hours in and be the most productive you can, try out these tips.
- Try to do 8 hours in the office, and 2 at home during the week. Sitting next to your spouse on the sofa in the evening allows you to multitask: spending time with the family while working.
- Be home for bedtime. If you have kids, make sure you are home at least 3 times a week for bedtime. I find that I can leave work around 6pm, get my kids bathed and put to bed, eat, then get back to work. Life is short, and you shouldn’t miss this special time of the day.
- I like to be home at 5 on Fridays, so I will work one late night a week so that I can cut out early on Friday.
- Save email for later. I find that addressing my email at night, when I’m a little tired, is a good use of my brain in a tired state. Doing this regularly gets people used to expecting 24 hour turn around on emails, rather than immediate response. Plus, doing email all at one time at the end of the day allows you to not get interrupted during the day.
- Use your time efficiently. Eat lunch at your desk. Get a smartphone with email. Your drive to work is a great time to check mail.
For those times that your spouse looses their patience with you, I suggest reminding them that if building a successful business was easy, everyone would do it.
Tips for Hiring QA Engineers for an Internet Startup
The one position I continue to have trouble hiring for is QA. I manage a development team of 8 others. 5 Ruby on Rails developers, 2 Java and C# developers, and a system administrator. My team is quite sharp. Finding a QA person that can fit in to a Internet Startup Agile Development team has been quite a challenge. And if you are a small company, like mine, you only get one person for this role. The person you hire needs to be a rockstar. No budget to have multiple people.
So what makes a great QA person? Well I believe you should look for the following qualifications:
- QA Vocabulary. Nothing is more annoying than a QA candidate who can’t tell me the difference between white box and black box testing. There is a good set of software QA terms here http://geekswithblogs.net/srkprasad/archive/2004/06/02/5795.aspx and here http://www.aptest.com/glossary.html
- QA testing skills. I usually take a story that is ready for testing and have the candidate take a shot during the interview. I find it useful to leave the candidate alone while they do this.
- Resumes that have grammer/spelling errors… trash ‘em.
- Extension of the product manager. I don’t get to review every story that is developed and release, but the QA engineer does. So your QA person is an extension of your product people/person. It is critical the QA person get a feeling for what your product manager likes and dislikes.
- Hard Ass. You need to make sure that your QA candidate can stand up to manipulative developers that try to convince the QA person to “it’s not a bug, it’s a feature”. The QA person needs to not roll over everytime they are steamrolled.
- Flexible schedule. That’s right, the QA candidate needs to be comfortable with working long days and nights, especially just prior to a release.
- Relevant experience. Hiring a QA person for web testing that only has tested windows clients is not a good idea. You are a startup, you need results fast. Your not in training mode.
And of course, finding this person sure isn’t easy… so good luck!
About
A blog about software development, marketing and general business practices at an Internet Startup.
Keith is currently a co-founder and Director of Product Development at RideCharge, a startup mobile and web taxi booking service. Prior to RideCharge, Keith has been an IT project manager, Java developer, and PeopleSoft developer. He holds a MS in E-Commerce Technolgy from DePaul University.
