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Comment by notJim | Hacker News Reader

It is incredibly difficult for me to express how much I hate this kind of smug startup boosterism. There are hundreds, thousands, millions of reasons not to start a startup that don't have a goddamned thing to do with pessimism. It's like you've never met, talked to, or considered the possibility of the existence of anyone who isn't caught up in the silicon valley echo-chamber.

Your dreams do not make you morally superior. Your ambition does not make you a better person. It does not make you smarter than everyone else. It doesn't make you immoral, a bad person, or stupid either. Having the maturity and humility to recognize that everyone chooses their own path for their own reasons, many of which are beyond their control, is the only way we can possibly relate to other human beings and live a humane existence.

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I agree with almost everything you have said, with the exception of one principle.

The drive/desire/ambition to do 'better' DOES make you a better person. The people with that quality are the ones who've provided every major improvement in quality of life around the world.

note: had a totally different answer here which I decided I did not like. Apologies.

I had a lot of difficulty replying to your comment. I feel intuitively that it's wrong, but it's hard to articulate why.

I guess there are a couple of problems:

a) ambition often drives both good and harmful behavior. Because of this, I feel that ambition is morally neutral.

b) I rankle at the notion that people can be "better" than one another, except in extreme circumstances. Is Mark Zuckerberg better for inventing Facebook, or is my dad better for making a career of healing people's marriages and personal problems through psychotherapy? My dad likes what he does, and is successful, but those who know him would not describe him as ambitious per se. Personally, I believe that Mark Zuckerberg and my father do what they do for their own reasons, and not out of altruism or a desire to make a better world. Or maybe they both do what they do out of a desire to make a better world. I don't think either of them is better than the other.

Do you think someone can be worse than someone else? That someone can be selfish, inconsiderate, have only interests in making things better for themselves, regardless of how it may negatively impact others? Do you think there's different degrees of how much worse someone can be? I'd suggest that if you do, then this also implies that people can be better than others to varying degrees.

Well, my main point in my comment is that choosing a different occupation or choosing a different company to work at doesn't make you a better person.

I think you and the parent may be talking past each other. When most people talk about "un-ambitious" people they're talking about "cogs". People working in some generic job in a big company.

Your dad sounds like he probably effectively has his own business which I admire and aspire to.

Personally what I hate is this attitude that think if you didn't become google/facebook you failed. There was a reddit post a while back about some guy who opened a cleaning service that replaced his "cog" salary and allowed him to quit his day job. One of the first comments was "this won't scale!". He was able to quit his job! How much more scale does he need?

> When most people talk about "un-ambitious" people they're talking about "cogs". People working in some generic job in a big company.

No, that's exactly what I mean. You are not better than the "cogs" simply because you've made different occupational choices. We all have our reasons for choosing what we do. And some people don't even have much choice.

We'll have to agree to disagree on that. Right now I'm a cog in a big company and I know what I do isn't as valuable as what entrepreneurs do. I came in to a team who had a horrible software system, replaced everything and brought running costs way down by decreasing code size while increasing features and maintainability. But in the end, it's all for nothing. As soon as I'm gone the team will either be decommissioned entirely, handed over to some other team who will have no use for what I've done or outsourced somewhere that will rewrite everything again.

Big companies are just a game of musical chairs for managers. They just need to show something on their 360 reports so they can get a promotion and they couldn't care less what happens to their previous team once they get that. They don't even care about the company itself, only climbing the ladder. If the company fails then they can just move somewhere else with their new higher rung experience and start the climb again. If you're a developer in such a place either you're trying to play the game yourself or you're literally whoring out your mind and fingers for cash. The job itself is utterly meaningless and can never be made meaningful because what you produce is irrelevant. The only part that matters is the politics.

It's true that many of us end up here because we have no other choices, but it's important to keep in mind what you're actually doing. Don't romanticize being an intellectual prostitute. Save up as much as you can so you can get out. If you're happy to stay in such a place, then yea I do have less respect for you.

I appreciate the response.

I would say that we mostly agree on both points.

I think that the word 'ambition' is colored in a negative light, which is probably the source of your intuition feeling that it was wrong. That's why I specifically used 'drive' or 'desire' first in the sentence.

Your father is successful, because he had the drive to get to where he is in life. I was not referring to the drive to be better relative to others, per se, but the drive to better oneself, one's life quality, etc. by internal yardsticks.

As a few other posters have talked about - I think someone who gets into a 'cog' position, and then ceases all personal growth and betterment is 'not as good of a person' as someone who gets into a 'cog' position and continues their attempts at growth and betterment. They may end their life/career in the cog - successful growth is not the requirement, merely the desire for it. And that growth may be entirely outside of 'work' - moving into charity, the arts, etc. is all just as good, from my point of view.

Does that clarify at all?

The drive to do better at picking up women or attracting capital or getting people's attention doesn't necessarily make you a better person, although it may or may not make you happier. Because of that kind of exception, I think it isn't really accurate to say that drive or desire in itself makes a person better.

I think it is far from being as simple as that. If one's ambition is to have better eyebrows, at best it makes you better in that regard, but quite likely says little if anything good about you. To take it a bit further, if someone has the drive/desire/ambition to be a better contract killer, I think we can keep them at the back of the pack.

I've met plenty of entrepreneurs whose desire to "do better" means, to them, a willingness to violate ethical, moral, and even legal principles that society holds quite dear. The valley isn't that different from Hollywood in this regard. It doesn't mean you can't find some outstanding people amongst entrepreneurs, because you absolutely can, but you can encounter some of the most horrible wretches known to man as well.

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