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Comment by yowlingcat | Hacker News Reader

This is a horrible article and borderline (maybe full blown) blog spam. While there's nothing intrinsically wrong with going after unsolved problems, and making headway on one of them is a really important part of intellectual and professional maturity, it's not a panacea, and it doesn't come without severe existential risks. Nowhere is the downside of going after moonshots addressed, which is failing completely and having little to show for it. I have seen many a talented friend (and friend of friend) waste 7 years of prime youth going after something that wasn't just hard, but intractable. I can't put into words what an incredible hit to momentum, network, and skillset that is. A huge part of professional maturity and productivity is determining value at risk, using leverage, and getting outsized impacts out of reasonable amounts of effort.

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Ha! Strong opinions!

I think my failure here is that I did not fully explain, that this applies mostly to the corporate environment of technology companies, where the risk of failure is much, much smaller and you distinguish yourself from the rest by having appetite for risk.

I of course totally forgot, that there is a whole startup world and convincing people to chase moonshots without any risk analysis should be indeed illegal. Young entrepreneur: YOU SHOULD WEIGH YOUR RISKS BEFORE YOU GO INTO THE WILD!!

I think that this caveat basically completely transforms the post. Take my admittedly strong opinion with a grain of salt, but I think rewriting this post with that context at the beginning (and from that angle) would really, really elevate it. If you get into a comparison of how risk-adverse versus risk-centric approaches can compare and contrast with career payoffs, I think you get much closer to a more detailed, useful comparison that helps folks think about their careers. With that said, I do think that courting risk as its own reward is flawed. It's risk weighted return that's the powerful part -- if you could make gigantic impacts risk free, you should do that.

In fact, to a large extent, I think this is a huge part of what senior engineering is all about. If there are table stakes things to be done that will make a big impact, you want to learn how to communicate that, negotiate implementation against roadmap, and then qualify and quantify the impact after executing. I believe and have observed what makes much of corporate software engineering so lucrative is the value you can add with relatively low risk. So, to court risk is give up a systematic advantage. It seems to be quite backwards to me.

There are problems and problems. I think the reader needs to adapt to their reality when reading the blogspot. Sometimes the reader needs to do some work and contextualize a piece of advice. I think the blogpost made total sense to me, in the context of my work. There is a (not-so-fine) line between embarking into a intractable or incredibly risky task and a hard problem that nobody wanted to do solve. Keep in mind that a hard problem is not necessarily what you find hard but what your colleagues find hard, that is the point. Go after something that you know can be done but nobody has ventured into. I enjoy a great amount of freedom at work because I've been tackling these hard issues. You see, when you address an elephant in the room, even after being solved, people will not venture to go there and they are happy to leave you alone since you are working on the elephant in the room.

Your friend can apply the 7 years of experience to something less risky.

It is often the case that you learn more from success than from failure. You recognize this when you work with and try and compete against peers who have been soberly building momentum their entire career without a low output quarter.

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