Climbing the wrong hill (2009)

Indeed, talented, and fully energetic young people should throw themselves immediately into the startup arena, before they've developed any real skills and particularly life skills, bargaining savvy, etc.

That way the financial system in the form of VCs can extract maximum benefit for minimum expenditure.

> Over the years, I’ve run into many prospective employees in similar situations. When I ask them a very obvious question: “What do you want to be doing in 10 years?” The answer is invariably “working at or founding a tech startup”...

It's great to ask what questions, but they should almost always be followed by why questions. Why do you want to work at or found a tech startup?

Startups have been glamorized by the media for well over a decade, and the hype today is at a fever pitch, so it's really no surprise that startups are so appealing. That doesn't mean that most people have a realistic understanding of what it's like working at or starting one.

Frankly, "I want to do a tech startup" is as much a red flag as "I want to make a lot of money." It's so non-specific as to be effectively meaningless. A startup is just a vehicle, and if you don't have an interest in driving somewhere specific, you're driving for the sake of driving.

> There is a natural human tendency to make the next step an upward one.

There's also a natural human tendency to believe that the grass is always greener somewhere else.

The prototypical Silicon Valley startup can be as demanding as an investment bank, and a good number are chaotic and dysfunctional to boot. And you don't have folks like Sam Altman talking about "founder depression" because running a startup is the next best thing to heaven.

There's a good reason near-term rewards are overvalued relative to long-term ones. Long term rewards might never happen.

This is not a good analogy. Money is the obvious reason one stays at the "lower hill". Thus it is not a question of whether the person can stoop down from the "lower hill" and get to the "higher" one. It's a question of which hill is really higher (by that person's standards).

That is difficult to have the resources banked sufficient to leap off the little hill and find yourself in the desert of despair, to then randomly leap back to the base of what turns out to be the big mountain, but not have the clout to climb it. I appreciate the comparison to an optimization search algorithm, but life is really complicated for most to have the stomach for that level of risk.

There is an important difference between the algorithm and personal career: climbing the other hill has nothing to do with climbing the highest hill, but that's not the case regarding career development. Startups are creating new things and jobs, so how do you know that current jobs would not provide valuable assets in the future?

Speaking from experience this process does have demerits. For example - how long before you decide that the hill you just climbed is not the highest. It's easier to figure out that a banking career is not for you but it's not that easy to figure out that a startup job is not for you.

It makes me wonder - is there a good hill-climbing algorithm that takes account of uncertainty - where the hills can go up and down over time as you're climbing them? I suspect the naive algo might perform better in those conditions - maxima that are closer to you would be favored.

Don't forget to count the number of steps! Reaching the top of a small hill might take 2 steps, and algorithms like simulated annealing (unlike actual annealing) keep track of the entropy change.

there is probably a change of hills with the time. > Hills are dynamic > Hills are interconnected > Hills climber is not constant over time

tldr: Premature optimization is the root of all evil