I'm a practicing Catholic and have worked either as a freelancer or a startup founder for >90% of my career. Not sure how you're drawing that conclusion but plenty of my peers are religious in a traditional sense and work in startups.

Given the tendency for programmers to be that edgy libertarian atheist guy, it's easy to be unthinkingly rude to a coworker who is of a churchly persuasion.

For example, it is commonly understood that religion and science are always opposed. However, it's rarely ever mentioned that Christian theologians for centuries consistently modified their belief structure to reflect reality as their understanding of reality improved. In other words, quite often if there was a seeming contradiction between doctrine and observable fact, the doctrine was changed, as opposed to ignoring the observable fact.

Obviously there are exceptions to this, like the Inquisition, or other dark periods through history. Religion is not without it's faults, but that is true of any principle around which people organize. The important part, for the materialist, objectivist, or athiest; is recognizing the organizing principles as being somehow useful to people prior to the refinement of the scientific method. I assume that those people gained real material value, and to dispose of what those people believed without extracting and maintaining that value is simply destructive.

I understand and respect the value JP provides to lost lonely young men who are struggling to find purpose in a hostile online world. Raging with hormones, and finding it difficult to sympathise with women and minorities, and a world who tells them that they have privilege and they need to acknowledge and help others more. JP is as valuable to them as Religion is to a starving subsistence farmer in the middle ages who is abused by his feudal lord, and has no hope of a better life for himself or his family. Hope is important.

But for the life of me I don't understand JP's appeal to the male HN crowd - wealthy, well-educated tech-savvy yuppies who have upward mobility, critical reasoning, and lots of leisure time.

Jordan Peterson:

* opposes same-sex marriage because it is "backed by cultural marxists" and represents "an assault on traditional modes of being" [1]

* opposes same-sex adoption because "the nuclear family is the smallest vialbe human unit: mother, father, child, and if you fragment it below that you end up paying" [2]

* does not believe that men and women can work together in the same workplace, and directly blames women for sexual harassment they endure if they utilize makeup and high heels because they're sexually provocative [3]

* believes that it is impossible to produce Art without God [4]

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4jef2C4T1_A

[2] https://twitter.com/zei_squirrel/status/1331507566388637698

[3] He doesn't say this that men and women shouldn't work together: He says "he doesn't know", and "we'll see" (if they can). But the second part he confirms directly to his interviewer. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yqn6YoMFiI0

[4] this and much more video links in this twitter thread https://twitter.com/zei_squirrel/status/1331505661817937921

> Christian theologians for centuries consistently modified their belief structure to reflect reality as their understanding of reality improved.

That is also laundering the history of religious persecution. Christian theologians embrace scientific consensus hundreds of years after the scientific community does, persecuting, ostracizing, torturing (mentally and physically) thousands of people until then.

> Religion is not without it's faults, but that is true of any principle around which people organize.

That depends on the principle doesn't it.

For example if you take "humanism", then the principle is that human beings are the most important thing that matters, every human being has value, and maximizing humanity's long term happiness and liberty is the key to a successful society.

On the other hand if you take theology, then generally, the religions that the vast majority of the world follows are based around 2 key concepts:

1) An omniscient deity whose wishes and directives must be obeyed implicitly

2) An after life that is offered as a reward to the righteous followers.

#1 introduces an inherent power structure. Once you accept that some entities are "greater" than the other, it inherently follows to apply the same to the "kingdom of men". Every power imbalance throughout history from Lords to Kings to Slave Masters was justified based on a delegation of hierarchical authority deemed justifiable from religion.

This continues to this day amongst Conservatives whose original purpose was to maintain aristocratic power structures after the dissolution of monarchies, and now perpetuate historical inequalities under the guise of individualistic authority (i.e. no imposition on generational wealth and power imbalances through taxes or any other socialist policies)

#2 incentivizes obedience and behaviour. It also creates INFINITELY permanent stakes (a 50-100 year lifetime vs an infinity of reward or an infinity of punishment) which incentivizes the desire to convert others to the cause. After all if you believed that your beliefs would bring you SALVATION would you not need to/want to spread this message to others? Logically, yes. But what happens if those do not believe the message or worse force you to question YOUR OWN conviction and faith?

Well it turns out the problem with a faith-based belief system is it doesn't hold up well to logical scrutiny and humans aren't great at being flexible in these situation. You can either collapse and give up or lash out at the person who is making a mockery of your beliefs. Hence, the Inquisition, and every "dark" part of Religion throughout history, that is not actually a part of it, but the complete whole. It's not an aberration, it's the default status quo. It's not a bug, it's a feature.

This. From "depends on person" perspective I fully agree with you, from monetary perspective I agree with the author.

After years of working for startups, now success for me means, financially independent to work on whatever I enjoy doing, not some OKR, KPI set by person who already achieved their success story.

Haven't reached my success. I was hesitant to do leetcode and join FAANG companies 10-15 years ago, worked for bunch of startups as an employee and contractor, all failed, financially I still depend on big boss, and even can be laid off if layoff season starts again.

FAANG are not only more stable, but total compensation for 10 years can easily beat 1B$ exit startups, assuming you get 0.1% of equity there

How on God's green Earth did you jump to that conclusion? Can't it just be a matter of personal preference, as you said it yourself?

>How on God's green Earth did you jump to that conclusion?

The author wrote: "From the ages of 19-21, I spent my time as a missionary for the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints, popularly known as the Mormon church. I worked 12 hours a day for two years straight with only Christmas and Mother’s Day off. [...] For this job, I was paid a total of 0 dollars."

It seems reasonable to assume that non-religious people wouldn't do that for $0 pay.

I don't understand what this means. Are you just talking about connections?

I've worked with a lot of Mormons in tech. You may have too and not realized it. In my experience, they tend to not put an emphasis on it, it's a more private thing.

Their support system and rigid structure is unparalleled for such a large scale in the US. Their funding church is very wealthy, and the discipline churns out people that are very effective in high growth industries, which is just a convenient side effect relevant right now.

I wouldn’t trade my years at a startup for anything but they can be run by tyrants in a fiefdom just as much as a VP runs an org, sometimes more so as they have no one they report to.

The compensation itself is a lottery and should be treated as such. And there will be shenanigans.

I do think that startups more closely align with people with less personal responsibilities and a higher tolerance for risk.

EDIT: downvotes? just saying - this was my personal experience. YMMV.

Depends a lot on the specific startup and specific big company. The 50-person startup I worked at right out of college never really found product-market fit, and tried many things, and the product I worked on (and deeply enjoyed working on technically) was always a second-class product to the business. And we were selling B2B software, so I was never motivated by wanting to change the world, just by wanting to ship some cool software.

I get that same motivation at my current 1500-person employer, where I work on developer tools; I get to work on interesting technical problems, and the fruits of my work go to help people in, frankly, the same industry as most of our customers at the startup. I'm a little more involved in what out internal customers actually do and therefore find it more motivating to help them, though the work they do, per se, isn't interesting to me. And there are plenty of driven, passionate, and friendly people around who care about the same problems I care about, and it's much easier to find a few of those people and make a community when I've got orders of magnitude more people to try to work with.

I've been working in startups for 10 years (my whole career so far) because I was optimising for learning, not financial return. I made the bet that startups would be the fastest way to learn (breadth of tasks, workload, exposure to more senior people etc) and I am allergic to larger company bureaucracy.