> "Career Notes for Engineers and Designers"
My expectation is they excerpt content from real-word engineer like head of engineering or head of design some of giant tech companies.
But it seems they excerpt content from bunch of VC and i think is good from entrepeneur perspective.
It is in the VC's interest to push more and more people to take risky bets - this gives them more horses to bet on, while managing the risk through diversification. For the individual horse (or er, engineer), this still remains a risky proposition.
Which becomes far less risky if before you launch in the startup world, you take a couple of years after graduation to work for a well known and reputed company (say google). That will guarantee a soft landing if your startup experiment fails, which is very likely.
Also, generally, if you are a good engineer (as long as you learned things and improved, if you worked at a company that didn't become a big success), Google et al will welcome you back with open arms.
But how many of these companies are out there? Granted, we are a few waves after the deluge of social startups with gigantic user bases and no idea on how to monetize them, but what you describe is still a minority of startups.
And the suggestion doesn't seem to be "join a company that is already doing well", it's "join a startup or create one, instead of going to work for some corporation".
This is what I think: in engineering (and even more, in business), right after your graduation there is this window where you have large and famous companies with deep pockets who are eager to get the cream of the class. If you join them even for an year or two, you have significantly smoothed the rest of your working life.
Sure, you can always join them years later, and you don't need them to succeed - but statistically, the impact of taking advantage of this window cannot be denied.