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Comment by dshipper | Hacker News Reader

Thanks for your feedback. As far as the meaning of the article, I wasn't trying to prove a point as much as elucidate something I was thinking about yesterday: the skills you pick up through entrepreneurship.

For the past 4-5 years of my life (starting in high school and continuing through college) I've been concentrating a lot of my time learning how to be a better entrepreneur. That's to the detriment of almost everything else in my life. And it's worth it to me because I love it. Even better still, it seems like a pretty safe bet because worse comes to worse and I completely fail over the next few years I'll still be able to get a job as a coder somewhere.

But the thing about being an entrepreneur is that it encourages you to get marginally good at a wide range of skills instead of REALLY good at one area. And so something I was thinking about is the potential consequences of this decision on my life. This is what I came up with.

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> But the thing about being an entrepreneur is that it encourages you to get marginally good at a wide range of skills instead of REALLY good at one area.

Being marginally good at many things show that no matter what gets thrown at you, you'll pick it up fast. This is necessary in entrepreneurship and it becomes ever more necessary elsewhere as the pace of software development increases.

There's no such thing as "algorithms" skills anyway. No matter what skills you have, you'll probably need to adapt them heavily to whatever new job you find yourself in.

Yes, we're mainly startup-ish people around here, but I'm pretty sure that even if I wasn't on, I'd hire a jack of all trades with a proven track record over skills in "math" and "algorithms", whatever that means.

Most multi-skilled people i know (and i include myself) would not be happy dedicating their time and talents to a single thing. Although its not a technical limitation, i would say the reasoning makes sense to me.

Your story is the state of reality now for certain types of programming jobs. Here in DC there are plenty of government contractors who don't care how much demonstrated success a person has shown as a tech entrepreneur; they want a guy with a CS degree and 10 years enterprise Java experience ONLY. The folks who work these types of jobs are your classic middle-age engineers. They read a lot of documentation, have a lot of meetings, and don't much care about being agile or fast.

The reason people here on HN are objecting to your story is that there are ALSO coding jobs for startups, PR firms, or consumer brands where they DO value entrepreneurship, speed, and creativity. And these types of jobs will never go away. Edelman or Nike is never going to convert their development shops to all CS Ph.D.s with 15 years experience optimizing compilers. They're always going to be building interesting interactive projects for major brands, so they need people who are always restlessly finding the next cool thing.

So just make sure you always apply for the latter kind of coding job and you should be good.

Amazing article. I can relate.

I too am an entrepreneur who sold one company and am well onto my second one. (Though the fact that you've sold multiple companies is damn impressive!) Running your own company means you have to wear many hats and its tough to get really good at just one thing. Some days you are a graphic designer, or developer, or marketing, etc.

However, I also think it's boring to be stuck in one specific area for a long time. I like to be challenged, and I am constantly learning new things to broaden my knowledge. Whether or not this is a good thing remains to be seen.

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