What a great observation. So obvious, yet hardly ever mentioned.
I'd add...
In a startup, you choose to work on what you want, how you want. At a big company, you're stuck working on whatever they want, however they want it.
Yes, I much prefer working in a small company for all these glorified (and popular here) reasons but it doesn't mean startups are good for everybody. In fact I believe startups do not appeal to real hackers, guys who we quote and admire. My limited personal experience confirms this too: smart people I know work at IBM, Motorola, Google and Microsoft and they're HAPPY.
And this is why:
Let's face it: in a startup, most often than not you're working on something trivial, technically simple, something that can be "released often, released early". Some minor "incremental improvement", and you've got PG books saying "it's OK". At a startup you (most probably) will be working on something that most of your friends will call "stupid shit" behind your back. Let's not pretend this elephant isn't there. There are exceptions to every rule, but it's a rule nevertheless.
And this is something I miss the most: an opportunity to work on hard problems, not necessarily even succeeding: this is why startups almost never try. And this is why my ideal "exit strategy" is to cash out (some day) and spend my days in academia.
Wow... This was very sudden (even for me) and perhaps misplaced rant.
You're also confusing exploratory programming with doing trivial work. Making a quick version 1 and then iterating works for both big and small problems. It just depends how long you keep iterating.
It's true that a lot of the work you do in startups is crap work, and that a lot of startups only take on trivial problems. But this is also true in research.
What I've done, and companies I was a part of, was just that - a bunch of incremental improvements based on 4-6 months release cycle. How can I be not sad about that?
They just call the results of the releases "publications".
That is why what you're saying here and in the above is a rant rather than advice.
"You've gotta try, because if you haven't tried then you haven't lived."
Sounds like that's what you're really sad about, and with reason. Doing something you don't want isn't any more fun at a startup than elsewhere. It might even be less fun since startups are more intense. You're right that startups don't solve this problem, but they don't cause it either. We cause it ourselves by not doing what we really want to do.
I struggle with this myself.
"Make something people want" isn't the axiom to invoke here. "Do something you want" is more like it. Gruntwork is inevitable, but when you're doing something that is truly your own thing, it doesn't feel so bad; the connection to what you care about is much closer at hand.
It's like geology: everyone focuses on the earthquakes and the volcanoes, but 99% of everything we see on the surface of the earth was created through a gradual process of accumulation and decay. Research is the same -- on a day-to-day level, it's labor-intensive and tedious. Only from the thousand-foot view does it become sexy and revolutionary.
- Linus Torvalds
- Andrew Tridgell
- DHH
- Alan Cox
- Rasmus Lerdorf
- Mark Shuttleworth (and most of Canonical)
- Guido von Rossum
They work at various companies by day and continue to work on open source when time permits them to do so.
They're happy to get the paycheck and go home. (Except maybe for DHH for hitting a jackpot of lifestyle business and Mark Shuttleworth for hitting the real jackpot).
Are any of them as ambitious as YCombinator crowds? probably not. But they "learned" to enjoy their life better than most of the younger generation these days.
He may have "hopes" as in "I hope Linux will become better" or whatnot, but certainly he doesn't have the hope of "Linux should run everywhere and anywhere".
I'm not saying anything in regards of Open Source.
My point is that non-Americans seems to be able to live in a "comfort zone" without having to join the startup movement and work like hell + eating cheap.
He worked at transmeta for crissakes.
Is Transmeta a startup that have an exit strategy where everybody will get rich?
A great test for whether you have a real system is whether you can sell it. That's why iRobot is so awesome. They make robots that people actually use.
Make something people want :)
Some other efforts that come to mind help illustrate the territory. Honda made a horribly unscalable walking mechanism in the ASIMO. It will never be more than PR. The best work from CMU & MIT's Leg Lab got spun out into Boston Dynamics. You've probably seen their "big dog" video. http://www.bostondynamics.com/content/sec.php?section=BigDog
Boston Dynamics is part boutique research firm and part startup. They'll probably be the first to sell a walking robot.
Honda makes a clunker, and the hungry, small companies make something that will actually work.
http://www.motorcyclemojo.com/articles/the-uno/
* Not disagreeing, just supplementing
Selection bias is funny that way.
But, I do know several famously good hackers (four, to be precise), and while three of them work with no equity for a mid-stage startup and the fourth works for Canonical, which seems sort of startup-y, none have ever started startups independently.
I do not think that what we read about here at hn is a random sample of "hackerdom" in the world today. I think that my background is probably much closer to that.
I have done work for over 80 companies, only a few were in the software business. Most did something else and needed some form of IT to do it. I have sat in the worst of cubicles, attended the most lame meetings, and worked on mind-numbingly boring "projects". Just last week I rewrote a 16 year old batch program that was taking 25 minutes to run. I found 12 unresolved bugs; the program has 25% LOC and runs in 3 minutes. My experience may not be the norm for everyone here, but this project has been the norm for me.
The only time I have ever worked on something interesting was either as a contractor with the clout to change the agenda or as an independent software producer providing a solution I already knew they needed.
In my experience, the state of application software in small, midsize, and enterprise businesses is stunningly deplorable. These people desperately need good software and don't know where to find it and have no clue how to produce it themselves.
Maybe you don't think that call center apps that get the agent off the phone in 2 minutes, accounting apps that deliver exactly the info that management needs, or an inventory app that actually allows you to change a SKU are "big problems", but I do. While so many are working on a realistic robot, a social network, or a rocket to Saturn, somebody has to stick around and grab the low hanging fruit that's everywhere.
Then I come to a forum like this where the thinking is "Just Do It" (sorry Nike) and it puts me in the perfect mindset to do what I've always wanted. hn is the antecdote to corporate malaise.
jl said, "I want to give other people a better opportunity than I had in my professional career."
I say, "I want to give myself a better opportunity than I have had in my professional career."
None of this was available as recently as 10 years ago. But now, thanks to modern technology and hn style thinking, I can turn all the little wrongs I've seen over the years into my "big problems" to work on.
I'm doing a startup in order to work on what I want.
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I do have to describe my projects in terms that matter to my corporation, but how is that any different than pitching to VCs?
"I can't work well with other people. Therefore, I must choose wisely whom I should work with..."
For sure, most of the time you're the only person you can work well with.
At a big company, you learn how to work with other people whether they're considered "match" or "not-match" with you. It's a life-lesson how to treat people regardless their attitude.
I'm currently working at a startup that is owned by someone else. I'm still stuck working on whatever my boss asked me to do, and however my boss wants it.
This depends on what kind of startup and also what stage it's in. In our case, my partner and I are still in the mode of trying to break away from consulting work to develop our own products.