It’s hard to tell whether Coder is more tragedy or farce. Take a couple of slightly above average teenagers, tell them they’re amazing, and give them millions of dollars. What’s going to happen? If you guessed toxic disaster, you got it. These two leapt into leading a company before leaving adolescence. They make every single mistake you’d expect a newbie to make but with a much larger blast radius. They’ve never worked a real job, never had to learn from mistakes, never had to earn the respect of others, never learned all the other critical career lessons. They have no experience to draw on, so they make impulsive decisions based on emotion or the last tech podcast episode they listened to. Worse, unlike the young founders you’ve heard of, they don’t have the intellectual horsepower or humility to make up for these deficits. When you talk to them about anything even a little complicated, they just don’t get it. You can tell they’ve only comprehended 30% of what you said. They don’t realize they missed 70% of it because they’re always missing 70% of it. They’ve read the blog posts and listened to the audio books, so they know what to do just like you know how to rebuild a car engine because you saw it on YouTube. At a subconscious level, they understand they have limitations So they try to hire their way out of their mistakes, most recently a new CEO. They’ll agree in principle to change. But at the same time they’re sure they know best. When the people they hire want to do things differently, the founders renege on their agreement. They never learned the importance of integrity, so they break promises without a thought. And then, inevitably the problems persist. But obviously they’re someone else’s fault, starting with the people they hired who didn’t fix things because the founders wouldn’t let them. The founders act as children do: throwing tantrums, calling names, and blaming others. This is the kind of company where people cry after a conversation with the founders. Finally they try to fire their way out of the problem. Just look on LinkedIn for the trail of bodies. And yet somehow the problems remain. There’s a way to dodge this, and that’s by being a compliant, twenty-something white dude who loves playing video games and smoking pot. But if you're older, a woman, trans, not a gamer, or have common sense and backbone, it’s not going to go well. They’ll enjoy making “jokes” about firing you. Unfortunately for them, this isn’t just a bad situation but a life-warping experience. You have to pity them. They’ll probably never recover. Recovery requires learning, and learning requires admitting fault, admitting that maybe you’re not as awesome as you thought. These two are hidden victims of the tech bubble. How could anyone reasonably have expected them to be adequate to the task? These guys might have had a chance at doing something of real value, but they got too much superficial success too early. Easy money put a couple of kids in way over their heads and probably damaged them for life.
