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Comment by gearoidoc | Hacker News Reader

There are plenty of large companies where you can go to your boss, express dissatisfaction with some aspect (tech used, projects youre involved with) and get an almost immediate turn around on.

Conversely, there are startups (even ones just founded) where the CEO is inapproachable and your input wont affect culture/product/whatever one jot.

As a programmer, my satisfaction comes from writing quality code on systems that are in some way complex and commonly used. There's not a lot of satisfaction to be gleaned from writing a dozen CRUD apps.

Btw, citing 'impact on the world' as a reason to join a startup is a really good way of coming across naive imo ;)

EDIT: I also disagree with your point on 50+ hours a week. 40 hours is about right with 50+ hours during crunch periods - which should be rare (2-3 a year max).

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Agree that "impact on the world" is naive and meaningless. It's like new grad resumes that hype leadership skills.

It's a cliché, but neither naive nor meaningless when the small company you're working for is trying to do something ambitious.

But you are talking about <1% of the companies making that claim.

It's naive because the vast majority of small companies crash and burn, with no impact whatsoever.

Also, since we're talking about Silicon Valley, it's naive to think that Uber-for-Dog-Walking or Grindr-for-BitCoin startup is going to change the world in any meaningful way. Most business startups are playing inside-baseball games that only certain companies care about, and consumer startups tend to be trivial contrivances for people with copious amounts disposable income.

There are a limited number of hours in the day, and the more time wasted on things you'd rather not be doing is less time you're doing things that make you (and quite possibly others) happy.

There's no moral imperative to not waste time, of course, but I'd argue that increasing happiness in the world is never as trivial as you make it out to be.

Sometimes that means something as large as giving dying kids a last wish, sometimes that means something as small as providing a better/faster way to do something we all already did. How many people wasted time and energy shitty homegrown workarounds for file syncing before Dropbox showed up? How many shitty, stressful, overpriced cab rides did people have before Uber came along? How many relationships wouldn't have formed without things like Tinder and Grindr?

All "trivial" web applications, but all increased happiness in the world, one way or another.

What's your motivation for making this comment? Is it to increase happiness, knowledge, understanding, or any positive aspect of any piece of humanity? Or is it to take cheap potshots at people who aren't working on what you've arbitrarily decided is the base level of importance?

(And lest you ask: My motivation for this comment is to increase understanding - hopefully I can change your mind)

> It's naive because the vast majority of small companies crash and burn

Most ambitious projects fail, but that doesn't mean they aren't more satisfying to work on. That kind of satisfaction has to do with the work and one's team. It isn't retroactive; it doesn't flip polarity because the project succeeds or fails in the end. Such work is more deeply satisfying because of its nature, even when we know that the odds are against us. And don't forget that most projects—especially most ambitious ones—fail inside bigcorps as well.

There's a cynicism going around about about startups right now where the game is to exchange negative generalizations with other cynics, kind of like trading cards. That's understandable as a reaction in the hype cycle—the startup hype cycle has entered a downturn among the early adopter types who populate places like HN. And yes of course some startups are derivative and some are lame, though the bias to dismiss nascent things as trivial is also a huge distortion, and easy to fall prey to when you're in a cynical mood.

But any account that minimizes the joy of working on a fresh, ambitious project with a small team is clearly mistaking a baby for bathwater. Greater work satisfaction is an important reason why someone might want to work at (the right kind of) startup that has little to do with expected payout and is a form of compensation in its own right. For that type of person it can change the calculus from "meh, it's a lottery" to "the greater meaning justifies the risk".

It's not about throwing the baby out with the bathwater. You're suppose to solve some small problem you have and then by proxy impact/solve something big because other people have a similar problem. So advertising "impact" and "change the world" is superfluous.

>>It's naive because the vast majority of small companies crash and burn, with no impact whatsoever.

Let me tell you a lot of people prefer to be the participant and fail disastrously than being audience all their lives and clapping/cheering for others.

If you take a moonshot aim and fail, you are going to end up far higher than the anybody else who is doing the normal routine.

I recently read an MIT career guide that said you should work 60 hours a week always, but 40 hours for your employer, 20 hours for your "career."

Sense of purpose is a real sources of satisfaction and happiness. If you work on something that you believe will impact the world, you will be happier, regardless of the actual odds.

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