Re:Ask HN: What stops you from starting your own startup/bus...
by solarmist on Sunday August 28, 2022 @09:07PM
(#32633809)
As someone that did do exactly this, it is an arbitrary and useless question.
The answer is simple and uninformative. Because it is the sane/rational thing to do.
It's like asking anyone with a career why they haven't started a business in their field.
It makes a lot of assumptions, ignores a lot of constraints, and treats all aspects of executing as trivial.
Right now, I have two years of experience in trying to do this. And I can sum up my experience as reality is an unpredictable bitch. I'm amazed there are as many crazy people trying to do this as there are.
The only reason I did leap is that I was frustrated and spent more than 10 years waiting for someone else to write the software I wanted. Now, after two years, I see I wasn't wrong, but even with a clear vision, this turned out to be 10x as difficult an area to make progress in than I had anticipated.
As a software engineer, you can ignore almost all of that. Life seems simple, but that's only because you have a literal army of people doing everything else.
The answer is simple and uninformative. Because it is the sane/rational thing to do.
It's like asking anyone with a career why they haven't started a business in their field.
It makes a lot of assumptions, ignores a lot of constraints, and treats all aspects of executing as trivial.
Right now, I have two years of experience in trying to do this. And I can sum up my experience as reality is an unpredictable bitch. I'm amazed there are as many crazy people trying to do this as there are.
The only reason I did leap is that I was frustrated and spent more than 10 years waiting for someone else to write the software I wanted. Now, after two years, I see I wasn't wrong, but even with a clear vision, this turned out to be 10x as difficult an area to make progress in than I had anticipated.
As a software engineer, you can ignore almost all of that. Life seems simple, but that's only because you have a literal army of people doing everything else.