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Comment by UkrainianJew | Hacker News Reader

Well, if you can properly formulate these questions, distinguish a good answer from a bad one, AND know how to write code, you should be talking to investors (or prospective customers) rather than applying for coding jobs.

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Unless, of course, starting a company is not something you want to do.

Then work at a large firm which will let you do these things, and fund you should it not work out. Our industry is still young, and problems to solve are myriad. If you can tell what the good ones and bad ones are then you are much to valuable to work on someone else's idea.

"Then just get your dream job; god, it's not that hard!"

I invite you to search developer jobs in a large (3 million+) metro area that is not San Francisco, Seattle, or New York. Developer jobs you will find:

- Shitty ad-tech company

- Knockoff ad-tech

- Shitty, knockoff ad-tech

- Fintech, but shitty

- Fintech, but even shittier

- Fintech, but actually a scam

- Fin-ad-tech

- Fintech for dogs

- Adtech for dogs

- Giant telecom where you will be put in a prison of a narrowly defined role where shitty developers go to slowly die

- Remote office of a FAANG where you can be put in a prison of a narrowly defined role doing shitty ad-tech to help an evil psychopathic hundred-billionaire get even more of a death grip on all aspects of our lives, but at least you're paid well

- (Rarely) Internal developer for a company that is actually doing something useful and interesting, but where you'll end up maintaining a shitty out-of-support enterprise system built on a base platform that does nothing where the real business logic is all embedded in their inner-platform key-value tables by engineering interns.

- Fintech

Hehe, I really like this answer. I feel a bit cursed and also lucky at the same time in my current role... I was given ownership of a project that is solving a $100M problem at a big company, but now that it is working well... random people from other teams are showing up to take control of it and kill it with their idiotic ideas.

And I suppose the alternative is to start your own company, take VC money, and thus become one of those shitty ad-tech, knockoff ad-tech, fintech but shitty, fintech but actually a scam, etc. companies? But at least you'll probably end up owning >1% of the company!

I guess I'd say if your idea revolves around shitty ad-tech or fin-tech, then no, that's not a good answer. But if you have a genuinely new niche ... maybe? It's a little like "burn this codebase and start all over". It's a gut reaction we all have, and 90% of the time it's a bad idea. But that 10% of the time ...

Disagree - for many people, rolling the dice is too risky.

If you have something nice to fall back on (rich family, nest egg) or no dependents, then sure.

You’re still rolling the dice if you go work in a startup, you might as well not bother and go to a FAAG (excluding Netflix) for that. Or is it MAGAF (Microsoft apple google amazon Facebook)? Lol.

In india the acronym is WITCH which is apt given the track record of these consulting shops.

I disagreed at first read, but you're right. These questions are geared for tech interviews in a startup environment, which assumes the candidate can take on risk. So why not grab for the brass ring?

If you want a regular no-risk paycheque then check out government jobs. Runway? Oh yeah we've been collecting taxes for centuries. Product-market fit? Yeah, we have these big guys with badges and guns who will come to your house if you "don't fit." We pay an absolute pittance compared to private, but your job will be there your entire working life.

There are tons of engineering jobs that are not startup risky or government boring.

You can be an engineer in retail, medical, insurance, finance, etc. there are tons of stable engineering jobs working for companies that don’t deliver a digital service or physical product.

Just cause you wanna work in startups doesn’t mean you don’t want to any filtering lol

I think the point they were making was it’s risky to join a startup, and it doesn’t seem like that much more of a risk to start a startup if you have the stomach for risk already.

There is a ton more risk to be founder than an early startup employee. A ton more benefits too, but the costs real. For one thing, if you are pre-funding, then you need to go acquire that funding without being paid in the interim. If you can afford that risk, then it might be good option.

I wouldn't come to that conclusion at all, they're completely different skillsets. FWIW I'm quite prepared to join a startup that seems like it has some great ideas and good people but isn't quite sure yet how it's going to become profitable. You do so always knowing there's a moderate risk it might not work out and you'll be back out hunting for another job within 12 months or whatever.

In experience it is not the content of the answers. Most cases you simply realise they have not answered those questions themselves/

I don't understand how that follows. It would seem that "having a good answer to these questions" is the key, not knowing how to ask the question?

You also need to have a product idea… That’s actually the hardest part.

You're received lots of responses pointing out why this is inaccurate, but one point I didn't see covered was that the degree of confidence required in "distinguishing a good answer from a bad one" as a prospective employer is _much_ lower than that required as a founder. Additionally, evaluating whether something is good is easier than coming up with something good.

Assuming you want to be talking to investors. Some people prefer coding, and may want to do it in a well-vetted startup.

This makes me wish I lived in a tech hub so I could have some semblance of an idea of what the market wants. The Midwest sucks for tech work. Maybe I should be reading TechCrunch more often lol

I see this sentiment all the time, and it is so backwards. Startups in tech hubs tend to solve problems that people in tech hubs have.

"I'm rich and lazy, I want someone to deliver me food from my favorite restaurant and I don't care if it costs 2-3x as much and takes 90 minutes."

"I need some place to put my piles of IPO money that might appreciate because returns are down elsewhere, and also I think securities laws are confusing and bad."

These startups attract a lot of venture money because investors in tech hubs have similar problems and so they are attracted to them.

But they are fundamentally not productive. They are market makers or middlemen or financial products. There is a much lower ceiling on what people will ever be willing to pay for these kind of things relative to, say, some novel industrial software that gets purchased by multi-billion dollar companies. Those industrial companies are tech companies, make no mistake, and they are almost universally not headquartered in SF or NYC. There's also a much higher ceiling on the potential market because your customers are actually making things.

I think it depends on the problem space you're interested in solving. I'm interested in databases and data tooling, of which a very sizeable chunk of the users for that are in SV.

That's a pretty narrow definition of what's productive. Information is capital. Being able to link up a customer with an on-demand driver adds a lot of value into the system.

You're right that middlemen are productive in the generality.

But

> Being able to link up a customer with an on-demand driver adds a lot of value into the system.

This is only true if the driver's rates are something the customer is willing to pay. Finding that match is the primary job of a middleman; a lot of American services matching this basic description gloss over that part of the match entirely.

Couldn't agree with this more, sadly the other missing piece is the personality required to do that. When added to the other three traits that are already uncommon to find in one person, you're talking about a very unique individual.

Well, then as patronizing as it may sound, if you are looking for regular developer job, you should care more about the technology stack (as it affects your resell value for the next job), what big features the company recently delivered (to see whether you'll be stuck doing soulless maintenance) the cash part of your salary (since you don't really control the value of that equity), the amount of work hours per week, and how much of an asshole your boss is going to be.

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