The feedback loop

Why everyone should try working in a startup

If there’s one thing that I vehemently love, it’s being useful. It can seem like a strange thing to enjoy when you write it down, but I think it’s something I share with many people.

I’d go as far as to say that finding something that you are useful for is an important goal for almost all humans. It’s probably the most influential subconscious goals we have besides mating, feeding and staying alive.

by Sandro Kopp

How I caught a glimpse of the Feedback loop

It follows from this that I despised university. If people asked me why I disliked university, I would critique things like the grading system that rewards conformity and forced memorization rather than creativity and thinking. Or maybe I would blame academic nepotism and funds being directed at research for political reasons.

Whilst I do think all those things are true, that’s not why I really hated university.

My repulsion was of an amygdaloid nature, I knew I disliked university the same way I knew I liked a kiss, the same way I knew I was hungry, or anxious or afraid.

I disliked university because I felt useless. No matter how much effort I’d put in, I wasn’t able to progress towards a certain goal, because there was none. The goal of universities is often cited as “learning”, but learning in of itself is no goal, it’s just a side effect of pursuing other things. Back then I didn’t understand that, at least not on a conscious level, but now I am almost certain of that fact.

So, I did what most young and marginally talented people do when they felt useless, I found a job. Lo and behold, I really liked working, but I didn’t really understand why. Nowadays, I’ve come to realize I liked working because I finally had a system of reference for how useful I was, albeit a very rough one.

At work, I had certain problems I needed to solve and, at the end of the month, assuming I wasn’t fired, chastised or demoted, I could conclude I somehow achieved what was needed of me. On top of that, I had colleagues who, being in the same team as me and risking the same fate if the team’s work failed, praise my successes and critiqued my mistakes.

This is in stark contrast to a university environment, where your “worth” comes from simply being there, from paying a tuition fee, either directly or through stipends from the government or other organizations.

I finally had a feedback loop, my work would enter into one end of it and out the other end would come to a review and usually a reward. It was a shitty feedback loop, but it was there and it was making me happy.

The problem with the feedback loop in large companies

I moved through several positions, to find what I liked doing. Going from working with infrastructure, to “researching” new platforms, to integrating machine learning algorithms into projects, to finding “state-of-the-art” methods to process and analyze large amounts of data.

Until recently, I thought I enjoyed changing companies and positions because I was working on more challenging projects, working with technologies I was more interested in and making more money.

In hindsight, that’s not the main reason why I found satisfaction with my “career progression”. It was because I was progressively moving to smaller companies and smaller teams.

A corporation that has thousands of employees is designed to be as unaffected as possible by the actions of a single individual. If you have thousands of people working for you, being resistant to individual fuck-ups is a must in order to survive. In this type of entity, no single individual can be the key to success (or failure), it has to be a collaborative effort on a very large scale.

This means sacrificing speed and individual agency for safety. More brains can validate, test and polish an idea, but the final product takes long and it belongs to hundreds of contributors.

The shortcomings of corporations are the reasons why startups exist. Startups create things which are unique because very few individuals had a lot of agency in creating them. Startups create things quickly, there are fewer layers between engineer and consumer.

But, the business-related shortcomings of corporations also reveal themselves in the feedback loop you’ll find in a corporation.

Slow feedback

If it takes a year to release a product, it impacts will be felt a year after you’re done with it.

Slow feedback isn’t bad only because it slows down improvement, but also because it’s addressed to a different person than the one who needed it. The mistakes I make today aren’t the mistakes I will make tomorrow, because they come from a different mindset, from a slightly different “me”.

Unless I have a fast enough feedback loop to make me aware of my mistakes, my mental progression will be built upon lack of knowledge of my past incompetence.

Noisy feedback

The other problem with the feedback loop of large entities is that it’s full of noise. It’s full o noise because it’s hard to attribute responsibility and blame and it’s full of noise because our brains will try to ignore certain parts of it.

Since the feedback is often collective, it’s about “what the team did” or “what the company did”, it’s very hard to understand your influence as an individual upon that.

Our subconscious is always hard at work trying to trick us into diminishing or boasting the role we played to make a particular thing happen. When a feedback loop is not directed at us, but at a larger whole, our subconsciousness will pick the parts that it likes and roll with them, the rest, the rest are the ones directed at “the rest of the team”.

Why I love startups

A clean(er) feedback loop

When I moved into very small teams, I finally understood the power of a clean feedback loop. One that has little noise and returns rewards a finished piece of work with feedback in a matter of days or hours.

Some may think this is scary, but it’s actually fun and liberating. Whatever I do, I know I will learn the extent of my aptitude or my inability almost as soon as I’m done. Which is great, because it not only means I can fix things faster, it also means I can improve myself at an amazing rate.

Learning your own worth

This fast and accurate Feedback loop can be the catalyst for an important type of analysis, that of your own self-worth. This expeditious feedback loop that allows you to understand the cost and benefit of your actions in a much clearer way. On top of that, you can’t really blame your mistakes on anyone or diminish the part you played in the process.

Eliminating those external factors is important for evaluating your own self-worth since many of us suffer from egomania and self-forgetfulness. Even worse, we suffer from both of them at the same time, your memory may give you too much credit for X and too little credit for Y. Not because you deserve the credit for X or haven’t contributed to Y, but because of deeply nested subconscious reasons that you can’t even comprehend.

To better estimate your self-worth, you have to eliminate those biases, which is much easier when there’s none else to blame and none else to praise. Furthermore, doing so is therapeutic, admitting to your mistakes and understanding your limitations, is probably the oldest form of psychotherapy known to man.

Knowing your limits and your own worth, in a certain field or when solving a certain problem, isn’t just a matter of tweaking your ego. It’s a metric that you can use in order to understand what you need to learn and how you need to learn.

It’s also the first step of approaching any problem that is currently beyond you, being able to understand why said problem is currently beyond you. The better you are at articulating what you can’t do, the closer you get to know how to do it. After all, learning how to do something, is just a matter of making all the right mistakes.

Building conscientiousness

The other amazing thing about working with startups is that it helps you build conscientiousness. Since your actions are suddenly of great import for the whole, you start putting more thought into them and into how they can and have gone wrong.

That feedback loop helps a lot here. If you leave a bug in a piece of logic when working with a large entity, you may never find about it or you may find about it years after the fact when someone else hacked around it. If all your mistakes will surface sooner rather than later, that can serve as a way for you to understand them and think about ways of avoiding them.

We live in an environment where, due to this lack of real feedback, it’s hard for people to understand how careful they should be when executing various tasks. This can not only lead to lacking vigilance, but it can also lead to being over-vigilant.

Whilst the “moves fast and breaks things” guy can sometimes be bad, the worst are people who always think they are treading on thin ice, they like to assume the worst and the lack of positive feedback encourages this tendency.

Building your conscientiousness doesn’t always mean being more careful, it means understanding when you should be careful and how you should be careful.

Again, none of us are likely to always fall on one side of the scale or another. Sometimes we are too careful and sometimes we are too reckless. Being conscientiousness doesn’t mean being careful all the time, it means understanding when you should be careful and about what.

Should you work in a startup?

Maybe, maybe not. What you should really do is find a good way of getting feedback for your work. A magic loop, into which you throw results, formulas, code or anything else, and from with you get feedback, resulting in you crunching out a better version of whatever you did before, in order to send it forward to be critiqued and tested again.

Having this feedback loop has really helped me, not only to become better at what I do but also understand myself better. I managed to find this wonderful loop by joining startups, but that’s not to say there aren’t other ways to find one or create one.

However, if you can’t procure a quality a feedback loop but feel like you dearly need one, you should try doing a bit of work in a startup.