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Comment by aashaykumar92 | Hacker News Reader

Not at all, there are probably plenty of good reasons including learning/getting the opportunity to work with other bright individuals.

HOWEVER, I make it clear in my post that I am only referring to 'entrepreneurial-minded' CS majors. These are students who presumably want to have their own startup or simply enjoy taking an organic idea and building upon it. Doing an internship at a large engineering company, in most cases, is not going to help/encourage you to be entrepreneurial spirited and do this. At least not as much trying to build something on your own. Another option that I present is to work at a company that is completely unrelated to your field and see if there is room in which software and/or hardware can help optimize that area.

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If successful entrepreneurship just required proper spirit, then Mao's policies in 20th century China would have all worked [1].

There's a lot that's good about your advice and intention, but don't forget that large companies tend to be large because they're extremely good at what they do. Interning at a few companies (diversity is good) can teach you what "being good" looks like in a way reading a blog post can not, because you learn by doing and seeing.

[1] (A gross approximation of his message was essentially that with proper Maoist thought, everything else would righteously fall into place.. but then it turns out that enthusiasm alone doesn't give you the skills to make proper steel (see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Leap_Forward)).

I guess that's more motivation x ability. If you know how to, but don't want to, you're not going to. If you want to, but don't know how to, you're out of luck too.

I don't agree with the large companies are large because they work well hypothesis either. It wouldn't cover disruptive startups gobbling up larger companies market share, nor would it cover companies which are small, but very good at what they are doing. Google did search better than Yahoo, and it dethroned it. Was Yahoo larger than Google when Google started out? Yes. Was it better? Not neccesairily. And no matter how good your flight checking app is, you'll never become as large as Google, which doesn't mean you're doing a worse job than them.

Also, size breeds inefficiency because it averages. If your a 2 person startup, and one of you has no clue at all, you'll fail. If it's a 2000 people corporation, incompetence can and will slip through the pores (Else I honestly can't explain how some programmers got their jobs). The same way a large company can teach you what "being good" looks like, it can also teach you what "being bad" looks like, but they believe it's "being good". Organisational size is no guarantee for quality, the same way popularity isn't. Else Java would be the best language.

Why not? HN sometimes seems to act like there's some ticking clock and you must start a startup right now or die poor.

There's a lot more to entrepreneurship than just starting a company, it's more a way of thinking. So you can work for a BigCo with ambitions of doing your own thing in the future and learn as much as you can about how BigCo operates. What seems to work, what doesn't, why are they doing X this way?

In fact in most industries , successful entrepreneurs are very often those who have experience in the industry as an employee. They know how to business works, so they know what to optimise and what mistakes to avoid.

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