What would have been the right time? When you were a student studying during your first degree or your second? In hindsight, I think it is almost dubious to assume that exposure to this article would have helped you at any given time in the past. It's quite possible you would not have come to the same realization about tech entrepreneurship had you not obtained your AE and had the experiences that you did.

Fair enough - one article alone probably wouldn't have had the full impact. But I am envious of the generation of current high schoolers who can read HN all day. After a year or so, I imagine you can reprogram your mind quite a bit. Back in the late 90s, access to information like this was much more limited.

What you are getting from HN at your current age with your experience, is not the same that what your young self would have gotten from the same content

I learned that working at Google pays a ton and not that hard to get in there. So I learned to code and got a job at Google and made a lot of money thanks to HN. My life got a lot easier thanks to that.

I feel the value of HN is greatly reduced once you are more familiar with the industry. But to an outsider this site is gold.

How is it not hard to get into Google? Sounds more like survivorship bias.

I'm really good at math so I knew that learning the algorithmic thinking wouldn't be hard. All I needed to do was learn to program and learn algorithms. For people with a different skillset it wouldn't be as easy, but reading about it online made me realize that it wouldn't be hard for me.

I mean, when you read about interviews and the problems people struggle with you get a sense of what it is. When I read those I thought "That doesn't seem hard, I can do that!", so I did.

What you are describing is exactly survivorship bias.

Are there any sites that are gold for HNers?

I'm sure that's true.

I would like to say that I am young and I remember getting turned on to podcasts and reddit and good books when I was 15 or so, and being exposed to rational thought and discussion did a lot for my development I think.

Same. Unfortunately the internet isn't what it once was. I can't say I'm optimistic this strategy would work out for today's youth.

Occasionally I stumble upon an old article posted here and start reading, lamenting the missed opportunities if I'd only seen this article x years ago. Then a bit further into it I start feeling like I have read it before, and I suspect I often have.

Start up bros are becoming generic this space is filling up with garbage as well.

That's just the natural life cycle of social platforms.

Looking forward to what will come next

> I quit the industry and started from scratch as a tech entrepreneur looking for a more fulfilling career path

What is it you're doing as an entrepreneur you find so rewarding?

Right this moment I am asking myself how to shift more traffic from paid to organic. I created a list of about 10 ideas, the one at the top of that list being so out there that I had to immediately share it with the team. About half of the team members loved it and thought it will be the best thing ever, and the other half thought it's too expensive and we shouldn't risk so much money on an unproven concept that could fail completely. So the takeaway is quite clear - there might be something there, but I need to come up with an MVP that can be tested quickly (eg: 2 weeks) and cost-efficiently (eg: two weeks of one person's time).

Let me contrast that with my career from 20 years ago. My Master's thesis was to calculate the flight performance of an aircraft that ended up having its maiden flight 5 years later. Essentially, an entirely mathematically-driven exercise where you apply a well-known methodology to calculate a deterministic problem. I got bored of that pretty quickly and went into flight testing, thinking that I could keep my mind active by being more hands-on in my work. I quickly learned that flight testing is all about reading regulations and checking the aircraft for compliance. Sure, there is some flying involved, but nowhere enough to keep you stimulated every day.

If you're reading those two paragraphs above, one will appeal to you more than the other. It doesn't mean that one career path is fundamentally better or worse, it's more about what does YOUR mind need to be stimulated? Do you prefer nondeterministic challenges or would you rather apply existing processes and be super precise and accurate? Do you prefer quick turnaround times, or would you be happier knowing that there is 5 years' worth of budget for you and your team of hundreds of people to complete a project? Whatever your conclusion, you're not wrong - it just has to be right for you. I think PG's essay helped explain this.

> I quickly learned that flight testing is all about reading regulations and checking the aircraft for compliance. Sure, there is some flying involved

I recently watched some videos of people doing plane checklists; one had an error within two minutes, another had only one pilot doing the checklist while the other was away. I've also heard that humans skipping items or entire checklists is a general problem. Out of curiosity, would people with borderline or genuine OCD be a good fit for this? (Would it be practical to factor out the "checklist compliance" into a separate person? Seems like "remaining calm in an emergency, quick thinking, judgment and reflexes", and whatever else I might imagine are best for the pilot are at best orthogonal to "obsessive following of checklists".)

The pilots I know also like a lot of order in the rest of their lives (matching plates, keep their tools in order, just the sort of daily-life organization that is somewhat alien to me). Not to the point of clinically-diagnosed OCD, because I don't think these pilots have intrusive thoughts and compulsions -- they just get positive feelings from having things organized and slightly more deterministic.

OCD is medically disqualifying for pilots.

> > I went into Aerospace Engineering thinking that I'll be able to design radically different looking airplanes.

> What is it you're doing as an entrepreneur you find so rewarding?

The aerospace industry rewards making minor improvements to conventional airplanes rather than building something novel. Entrepreneurship rewards building something new and "radically different", which is what he was looking for in the first place.

Counterpoint: exceedingly few tech entrepreneurship companies are doing anything at all that is really new and "radically different". Most are doing rather small and unimaginative things that make money by doing some equivalent of selling more ads.

If the GP commenter was working at, for example, SpaceX (a large aerospace company), I can 100% guarantee their work would be more meaningful and rewarding than at basically any startup I've ever encountered. It often seems like it's a unique conceit of the HN community to think that most of the tech startups floating around here are really doing much more than established companies.

What's your definition of meaningful and rewarding? I'm an entrepreneur because I love waking up every day and do whatever I feel like. Nothing can be more rewarding for me. I'm not even that interested in what I'm building and it's certainly not something unique or special but it pays the bills and lets me be free.

For myself and most people in my circle of friends it's roughly: actively advancing the level of humanity. That means different things to different people - for some it's working on autonomous vehicles, for others it's space exploration, for others it's fighting climate change or poverty, etc. I think this is also related to age, though. When I was younger, most people I knew thought freedom and money were the best possible things in life.

I 100% get where you're coming from, but allow me to offer a counterpoint to your counterpoint. I don't know anyone who works at SpaceX, but a bunch of my classmates went to work for ULA (their competitor). I imagine that SpaceX is better managed, but the nature of work is the same - you're either calculating things using conventional wisdom, or you're writing simulations or coming up with other ways to achieve higher performance or save money. Either way, the work is slow and highly co-dependent on a million other moving parts. Once a project is complete, your ownership is unlikely to be higher than a tiny fraction of 1 percent. Also, at least at ULA, you better excel at selling your work internally.

On the other hand, SV is littered with names of people who single-handedly turned unprofitable late-stage tech companies into major successes. There's less regulation, stakes are lower, capital requirements are lower, less of the available landscape has been claimed, and the industry lends itself well to the power of computation. It's a little bit like trying to get rich in 18th century England vs 18th century USA. Would it be fair for US farmers to claim that they are doing "radically different" work compared to their English counterparts? Perhaps the work looked similar ("put food on the table"), but the rules and opportunities were vastly different and created different outcomes for individuals (as in - the smartest/most fit/hardest working people got more out of their work).

I respect your perspective, but it's one I mostly see in younger people. It's basically that personal achievement and being able to single-handedly deliver things are the most meaningful outcomes of work. The perspective that I've come to accept is that very few things that actually impact the world can come about this way. We didn't put men on the moon because some genius did all the calculations and fabrication himself (even von Braun was only one part of a very large organization), we did it because thousands of smart and determined people set aside their personal ambitions to work together on something great. The downside of this, of course, is that everyone is effectively a cog in the machine and it's easy to get demoralized that your contributions don't mean much.

I guess what I'm trying to say is that if you want to actually change the world, you're unlikely to do actually do it at a tech startup. You're instead likely to talk a lot about it while the real world-changing things are happening elsewhere. But you'll probably be happier at the startup because you get more of that magic combination of autonomy, teamwork, and quickly tangible results. I just personally get frustrated that almost every startup and its employees act like they're working on the biggest problems in the world when they just... aren't.

Edit: forgot to mention. I know two people who left ULA for similar reasons to you and went to SpaceX. They loved working at SpaceX in comparison to ULA because the level of company ambition, speed, and impact was so ridiculously higher. However, one of them left SpaceX to go to a smaller aerospace startup and the other is now at Raytheon for the superior work-life balance. I'm not sure what the lesson is there...

Won't address SpaceX though I know people there, but I too used to be on a track with an emphasis on individual accomplishment (academic mathematician) -- a lot about single-handed delivery. Sometime in my late 30s I realized that unfortunately, haha, the most impactful accomplishments are team efforts. To do big work, I realized I should find the right team. I am still working out what this means for my own career, but it's a huge change in mindset. And I'm working at a large, old-ish corporation now, and I think we are slowly & painfully changing how something very practical gets done.

ULA is definitely not like SpaceX and is not a competitor at this point. ULA is failing due to the exact problems that you describe and if your rocket is not reusable, it cannot compete outside government launches at this point. The only other rocket company that I see competing at the moment is Jeff Bezos' Blue Origin (and we are still waiting for the first New Glen launch). SpaceX is different with Elon Musk leading the engineering. Move fast, iterate, everyone working on the project should understand the whole vehicle so that people can see when making radical changes is the way forward. SpaceX was building carbon fiber pieces for their next rocket after the Falcon 9/Heavy, and completely scrapped that idea and went with a steel hull instead. About a year later the new design is going to launch up to 15km and land in the next few weeks.

Elon Musk comes from the start-up world and he is hoping to get to Mars himself, so he is in a hurry. I would say if you can get a job there, you should. If you have not already, check out reddit/r/spacex for lots of interesting stuff about the company and what they are doing. You might want to apply to work there if you are looking for a fast paced aerospace company.

There is also the startup called Boom that is working on building a supersonic passenger plane. They have just finished a smaller human-piloted supersonic test plane to prove out their ideas and hope to have the commercial airplane in service by 2025.

These companies are both run by people that started in software and then moved to aerospace without any other real prior experience in the field. Maybe you can have a similar route with founding a successful software company and then, with that success, found an aerospace one of your own. Good luck.

Maybe they founded boom?

I wish! I left AE before I realized that more recently opportunities started opening up for entrepreneurially-minded engineers. The whole quadcopter space was probably a pretty good opportunity for people with a background in AE.