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Comment by laurent92 | Hacker News Reader

Money is the end goal, but status[1], pleasure and upgrading my skills are necessary side goals. “From a million dollars, everything is your passion” (Joel on Software).

[1] Moderate status, I have humor telling everyone “I’m a CEO” (like Zuckerberg), given I only have 2 employees and had none for long.

I abhorre companies who pretend their IT will change humanity. Participating to the economy is already a great satisfaction for me, because the sum of our work built a civilization. In fact, I have ads in my office with the stupid phrases of competitors: “We advance humanity”, “Building the future since 125 years” etc.

I’ve built a product on the Atlassian Marketplace and it was a great place to innovate. Perhaps it still is, but Atlassian deprecates frameworks as soon as your stack is up, and their new Forge thingy is too locked down to build any smart app.

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> “From a million dollars, everything is your passion” (Joel on Software).

That can certainly be true before you get million dollars. Is it still true afterwards?

> I abhorre companies who pretend their IT will change humanity

I mean technically they're right, in that their IT might change humanity by 0.000000000000000000002% (if it can be measured at all)...

Link to the Joel On Software article you're referencing?

The funny thing is when I googled that phrase I got another Hacker News thread from the same user quoting the same line. It might have been from an event or something.

To my shame, you are correct, the quote is nowhere to be found. It’s not either from Paul Graham. I thought it was a famous quote & concept among us entrepreneurs…

I vividly remember a blog from Joel saying things along Why are entrepreneurs passionate for things that seem very niche? / The truth is, once they succeed, they become passionate / So we have a bias of selection when assuming that all entrepreneurs are passionate about their product.

But this post is nowhere to be found. I thought the quote was the title of that blog post.

I have to make amend and recognize that I might be senile and spreading a false quote. Thank you for waking me up.

All good, the sentiment is very much shared amongst entrepreneurs and fortunately spreading after the whole “follow your passion” BS.

Lots of successful people nowadays now say “do what you’re good at” or “do the unsexy things, or the things no one else wants to do” and the passion will follow. That’s a much more pragmatic and realistic approach.

Personally I really enjoyed software and coding, but after doing the grind at SV companies and my own gig I’ve come to realize that on a risk-adjusted basis, the larger tech companies are a better way to make money.

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