I once had a conversation with a potential co-founder who literally told me he was pasting my responses into AI to try to catch up.

Then a few months later, another nontechnical CEO did the same thing, after moving our conversation from SMS into email where it was very clear he was using AI.

These are CEOs who have raised $1M+ pre-seed.

Small business owners work 997 and you don't see them incessantly posting about it. That's the catch, though. They own the business. Founders can subject themselves to 996 all they want but it's a failure of management to expect that from employees for less than 1% equity.

I took a break from tech to open my own bookstore and I definitely work more hours than when I worked at a pre-IPO $7B startup. I'm way less stressed. At least my bookstore doesn't wake me up at 3am 3 nights in a row, and expect me to come to work the next day.

I interviewed with an early stage pre-seed startup with a very young team, like 25-27. I was interviewed by someone way more junior than me. According to the recruiter, in 3 months, I've made it the furthest and he told me this startup was churning through top tier candidates left and right.

After my interview, I immediately knew why. The team was so junior they didn't know how to evaluate senior talent. They didn't know what they wanted. I've arguably interviewed more candidates than the person interviewing me.

Last I checked, they still haven't filled that role.

The strong hires I've given all came from underrated candidates who didn't come from trendy backgrounds. Still think Dan Luu's advice holds up even more at early stage startups. https://danluu.com/programmer-moneyball/

I have been exclusively doing this in the past year, selling my services as “hardening vibe-coded prototypes for production” or “helping early stage startups scale”.

In the best cases, they were able to reach funding or paying users. Architecture debt is one of the worst kinds of tech debt, so if you set it up right, it’s really hard to mess up.

In the worst case, after my contract ended, the CEO fired the whole US engineering team and replaced them with offshore resources. This was an example of messing up despite the architectural and procedural safeguards we built.

To combat LinkedIn spam, I exclusively write wizard-themed LinkedIn posts: https://dungeonengineering.com/i-could-have-cursed-him-inste...