Comment by azanar | Hacker News Reader

Comment by azanar | Hacker News Reader

There is an interesting subtext in this article, which is to suggest that you take more risks as you get closer to the asymptote of salary growth, because it's the way to avoid diminishing returns for the additional skills you've learned between hitting the level of "experienced" and now.

It's the opposite advice that makes up common wisdom, which is to take risks when you are young, inexperienced and without responsibilities, and then settle into the comfortable long-term job with small raises once you get past that phase. I'm not surprised by this; if technical skills compound at all, it would seem that a developer's value would trend exponential and not logarithmic. That is, so long as they don't weary and stagnate.

But then, there is also value for the inexperienced in a startup, in that you'll learn a ton, and be given a lot of responsibility and autonomy. It might be that common wisdom is only half-broken.

Granted, there are opportunity costs involved. You might be in a position where you have to trade capitalistic striving for a paycheck, as a ribbonfarm article posted here a while back put it. It's as much being aware of those opportunity costs, though, as it is knowing whether or not you are in a position to need to accept them.

Not quite. I think this is conventional wisdom:

If you take a risk and co-found your own startup with 0 years of experience, then even if you tank 2 years later, you are likely to wind up close to the 5 years of experience point of the hockey stick when applying for a job.

Basically, the startup gives you a small chance of huge upside, and on the downside, you become a normal W-2 salaried employee but begin at a point farther along than someone who played it safe the entire time.

Whether this happens in practice is probably highly dependent on whether the risk taker demonstrated some goodness during the failed startup.

If you take a risk and co-found your own startup with 0 years of experience, then even if you tank 2 years later, you are likely to wind up close to the 5 years of experience point of the hockey stick when applying for a job.

That's probably closer to the conventional wisdom around HN, but it is a far cry from conventional wisdom amongst the masses. The wisdom amongst the masses is that if you co-found or join a startup, you are playing roulette with your financial security.

But the article's point -- which I agree with -- is that even if you accelerate this process of getting to that 5 year threshold, you are doing yourself a disservice fiscally by settling in at the plateau unless you have a good reason forcing you into settling.

You're likely still learning more, and becoming more valuable, but it becomes much more difficult to extract that value through salary. So, it becomes beneficial to join companies where that only makes up a part of the total compensation package.

I certainly don't think that. If you're incompetent you can get lucky, have a moderately successful failure, and still know 4/5ths of fuckall. And you may then become that most dangerous of individuals, the ignorant 'expert'.

Skills don't really compound, it's not like interest where you gain 10%/year on your existing skill set.

We forget stuff, and things we learn don't always enhance/build on things we already know.

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