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Comment by cjbarber | Hacker News Reader

I'm interpreting your comment to mean that because an engineer won't be able to pick a successful company anyway, it is useless that they follow any career advice.

If that's a correct interpretation, then no, absolutely not. Most engineers (you see this if you sift through linkedin) make far less optimal (I believe) choices than they would by simply picking a Series A/B company backed by a tier one firm like Sequoia/A16Z/Greylock/Benchmark.

And surprisingly, people take very little time to think about what they want, what they care about, what they believe the world needs, what they enjoy, and so on. Doesn't seem like a good idea given they'll/you'll spend 50%+ of your waking hours at work.

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In life, it's often about picking from what's available to you at the time of making the choice, instead of what's optimal. Especially true of young people.

Many engineers that come to me for interview training (http://InterviewKickstart.com), have been at their workplaces for several years, mostly since college. When in college, you just want a job and a job in a brand name company like Cisco is amazing. It's usually too late until you realize that you were in a team that nobody cared about.

Then you try and interview to get into a good startup, only to realize that interviewing landscaping has shifted. Your only option then, is to go join an also-ran startup because they paid no attention to the interview process. It's a vicious cycle.

"it's often about picking from what's available ... instead of what's optimal."

That is true and is good life advice. However poorly it correlates with reality, a semi-comical mythology has sprung up that startups are only for young urban white male brogrammer ivy league grads in a handful of cities but only if they have rockstar abilities. Oddly enough an aspect of the mythology is there's a shortage of programmers and no one knows why, which is also pretty funny. Note that every other employee at a startup is fairly average and thats OK, only the programmers are held to this weird standard.

If normal people want to play baseball, then the a marketplace opens based on whats available, and most of us play on parks and recs fun leagues, or the Y, or pickup games at the park. However, the mythology is that The Best Pitcher In The World gets to select what major league team he plays for, and similar individuals are the only important people worth discussing.

Perhaps folks working at also-ran startups are not there because they are bad at picking but bad at getting hired[1] at more successful companies.

[1] This doesn't mean they're bad -- they could have trouble interviewing, or be subject to conscious or unconscious discrimination.

You would surely have to qualify what you mean by "optimal". I would say from a "roll-the-dice" perspective that an average engineer or designer that goes to work at an established Fortune 500 corp is going to make far more than the same at a prestige startup.

Full disclosure, I'm biased, I worked at one of those startups and got screwed bigtime; now I work quite happily at a mundane but profitable adtech firm for over 2x the total comp.

Good point. This advice is definitely aimed at a specific group of people with a specific set of ambitions.

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