I agree building a company just for the sake of building a company is as arbitrary and meaningless of an Ithaca as it is to want to work for say Google. However contributing in a meaningful way to improving the world is a noble pursuit and we need more people doing that not less. Whether we are already at max-capacity of useful contributing people is another question. Maybe the type of person who can build frontends for Google AdWords doesn't have the skills necessary to do something better and should be content providing a service and taking care of their family.

Everybody has to find their own path I guess. Also 99.99% of people don't care about improving the world and the world gets by just fine on its own. Or does it (global warming, war, etc.)? Who knows, who cares.

“the type of person who can build frontends for Google AdWords doesn’t have the skills necessary to do something better and should be content providing a service and taking care of their family” is one of the most condescending things I’ve read in a long time. Even for hacker news.

You ever watch that South Park episode where they make fun of Hollywood where all the actors love the smell of their own farts? These days I feel that this is a pretty apt of a criticism of SV and Bay Area culture..

How is that condescending? sub "frontend for Google AdWords" with "plumber, truck driver, etc." Not everybody has the skills, motivation, luck, to be working on problems that push the human race forward. So what? People should still be content. I would argue that we programmers are some of the most delusional about what our jobs really accomplish, and who they really help. The person making 500k at Twitter thinks they have the skills to make the world a better place, but do they? Probably not. And who cares?

Erm... wasn't that South Park episode explicitly about San Francisco, not Hollywood?

> Maybe the type of person who can build frontends for Google AdWords doesn't have the skills necessary to do something better and should be content providing a service and taking care of their family.

Whose definition of "better" are we required to use? I strongly suspect yours, mine, and the person building front ends for Google AdWords will be different definitions.

Exactly my point. Curing cancer is a more noble pursuit and a hell of a lot harder work and higher skilled than javascript programming. Somehow we programmers think knowing how to reverse a linkedlist and get hired by a FAANG automatically puts us in the upper echelons of engineers. Just because you make a lot of money in software doesn't mean you know how to actually build things that help people.

It is stunning how quickly self loathing turns into condescension.

Self-loathing is the justifying warm-up to condescension

To be fair, I believe the author is writing the article with a fair amount of self-awareness about that.

In fact, a happy, stable family with good work-life balance describes the textual Ithaca much better than founding a company does.

I think that some primal instinct gets triggered when you are building your own thing.

Hundreds of thousands of people use the product I helped build at my current workplace and I don't feel a thing. Yet having even a 100 daily users show up at the website I used to run felt exhilarating.