Are managers at a pizza shop / drywall contractor / design studio better than the average startup?
We can safely leave out "design studio" as these are much closer conceptually to programming shops.
But going by my own experience working jobs closer the former two categories - I would say "yes, and by a wide margin". The reasons for this are very straightforward:
(1) Both the customer needs, and the performance metrics in business in the "pizza-drywall" camp are generally much more "pure" (dare we say 10x as pure) as those in SD.
As in: "Can you make a pizza so good that not only you would would want to eat it as often as you could - but your friends would brag to their friends and neighbors about it as well? Or at least be good enough for the market / price range we're after? And can you make X per day, every day? And like not be a dick or show up hungover and stuff."
Versus: Are you a "culture fit"? Can you stay on top of the latest buzzwords? Can you spend all your available time for several weeks or months cramming for our ridiculous interview process - and put up with all the whiteboarding, ghosting and other gratuitous humiliations that we expect you to eat, eat, eat, and eat some more of in return for the exquisite pleasure of working with us? And once we deign to let you in - will you go along with our various brainwashing rituals (standups, agile, "DevOps culture", etc)? Or at least pretend to? BTW if you're kind of a dick that's actually okay being as many of us are, as you'll find out eventually.
(2) Infinitely less emphasis on what might loosely be called "theoretical" management techniques (see above) versus, again, nuts-and-bolts: "Can you do the work? Will you be happy doing it? Can we get along?"
Hands-down - while it would never be sustainable economically - I was infinitely happier at many of the food service / delivery / random construction jobs than at at least 50 percent of the tech industry jobs I've had.
We can safely leave out "design studio" as these are much closer conceptually to programming shops.
But going by my own experience working jobs closer the former two categories - I would say "yes, and by a wide margin". The reasons for this are very straightforward:
(1) Both the customer needs, and the performance metrics in business in the "pizza-drywall" camp are generally much more "pure" (dare we say 10x as pure) as those in SD.
As in: "Can you make a pizza so good that not only you would would want to eat it as often as you could - but your friends would brag to their friends and neighbors about it as well? Or at least be good enough for the market / price range we're after? And can you make X per day, every day? And like not be a dick or show up hungover and stuff."
Versus: Are you a "culture fit"? Can you stay on top of the latest buzzwords? Can you spend all your available time for several weeks or months cramming for our ridiculous interview process - and put up with all the whiteboarding, ghosting and other gratuitous humiliations that we expect you to eat, eat, eat, and eat some more of in return for the exquisite pleasure of working with us? And once we deign to let you in - will you go along with our various brainwashing rituals (standups, agile, "DevOps culture", etc)? Or at least pretend to? BTW if you're kind of a dick that's actually okay being as many of us are, as you'll find out eventually.
(2) Infinitely less emphasis on what might loosely be called "theoretical" management techniques (see above) versus, again, nuts-and-bolts: "Can you do the work? Will you be happy doing it? Can we get along?"
Hands-down - while it would never be sustainable economically - I was infinitely happier at many of the food service / delivery / random construction jobs than at at least 50 percent of the tech industry jobs I've had.