Ah yes, the founder’s dream: gaining familial power over young people’s entire lives to further your start-up, before they realize they should develop a life of their own outside of work to avoid complete burnout.
Hey, they can spend 1-2 years with me, learn to be a good developer, and then happily go do whatever they want. I'm not binding them to be with me and my company forever.
This is not the US startup scene. There are decent alternatives which don't use people up. No VCs, so no short term fixations beyond having enough runway to last 6 months.
I'm a worker in the trenches myself. If you read a different story, that's based on your perception or experience rather than my motives. You can look through my previous posts. I want everyone to be happy and fulfilled, and money is not my driving force.
All that said, I do believe that doing things well and providing a great collaborative atmosphere (even family-like perhaps) can lead to high performance.
What I do not want is people merely trading their time, their lives, for a bit of money. That is not living.
In a nutshell, the problem with the "family approach" is how it puts a very powerful tool into the hands of one's employer they can hold against you: your committal, loyalty or even reliance on others in the same situation. Should you ever want to switch places, you will likely have to rebuild your circle of friends, as they often do not take kindly to people "leaving the family" or simply lose contact due to no longer sharing anything big in common.
Similar things tend to happen when one has a circle of "friends" related to a physical activity: when they stop or change clubs, they often lose most of those "friends", as often the only thread holding things together is a shared activity and location.
At least by recognizing this, people can opt to not put all their eggs in one basket, which lessens any potential loss. Also, it allows them to look at different ways to establish friendships, in a way they can withstand more changes. Finally, there is no third party (the employer) that can use a potential insecurity against them (e.g. less financial growth because Bob is so afraid of rebuilding his circle of friends, he'll accept a stellar performance netting him 1% wage growth).
And as others point out: forced participation into social activities is not something everyone is favorable towards.
The issue here is that in an honestly positive scenario, the family concept is good. But in a manipulative scenario, it is bad.
When I was 22 and taking on my first development job, I would have loved to have a family-centric groups of smart, motivated people to be a part of. Instead, I did a contract with an IBM subsidiary. We worked sort of like a family, but our idiot manager ignored our scheduling advice and promised delivery in half the time we recommended. So we worked our asses off, as a small ad-hoc family, and still lost the next contract.
What if instead this "family" could be led by a manager who understands reality and doesn't overpromise and underdeliver?
If you ever work with any person or person in a high stress situation, they will become your family or your enemy. Family is much better. And if the greater circumstance is also comprised of family, then you can take on the world. If you don't get this, then you haven't experience it yet. This is not some Cali startup bullshit. This is real people pouring themselves into something they believe in - foolishly or otherwise.
