"Future career prospects"... well, that depends. What does he want that future career to be? More work as a peon in other giant corporations, climbing the ladder to middle management? That sort of thing can lead to looking back twenty years, thinking, "Why on Earth did I waste all that time?" Believe me, I know.

I often quote Mr. Morden from Babylon 5, asking "What do you want?" Most people don't have the nerve to even look what they want in the eye.

You aren't cast into one thing for life unless you choose to be. I'm sure startups would be happy to hire someone with Microsoft experience.

Out of people I know working for startup type companies, one cut his teeth building enterprise Java stuff at a bank and the other spent time in the military.

>>I'm sure startups would be happy to hire someone with Microsoft experience.

More importantly, a lot of them would be happy to hire someone with Microsoft connections.

> That sort of thing can lead to looking back twenty years, thinking, "Why on Earth did I waste all that time?

"waste" is subjective. Twenty years of your life working 100 hours a week in startups? Twenty years of your life traveling the world with a low paying job?

A particular path being appealing to you doesn't necessarily make other paths bad.

> Most people don't have the nerve to even look what they want in the eye.

Sure. Imagine the man who doesn't accept that all he wants is a stable job which will let him spend more time with his family. Instead, he works at a tiny company day in and day out, dreaming of the big payoff (with paid dinners).

When you're fresh out of college and/or looking for your first real job, working for any company with great engineering is very good for you and your career. You don't have to stay there for 20 years and become middle management. You can go from junior to staff/senior level programmer and learn real-world software development while getting compensated nicely. The same problems and lessons are learned as by going the startup way.

This quote from the post was pulled and is now being criticized without the most important context of the article.

Sam isn't giving general career advice here -- read this advice as if you're giving it to a risk-seeking, ambitious, 19-year old (the title of the article...).

In that context -- his advice makes perfect sense.

>risk-seeking, ambitious, 19-year old

The article isn't explicitly directed at "risk-seekers," but merely at ambitious people. It's incorrect to conflate the two. Ambition can just easily manifest itself as a desire to seek a large salary, climb the corporate hierarchy, and seek a nice lifestyle. As a member of the cohort at which this piece was directed, I don't know why everyone assumes that we want to expose ourselves to risk, or why everyone asserts that we ought to.

Why does everyone exhort the necessity of risking everything in an attempt to change the world? What is so bad about simply pursuing a nice life?

Three kids, a safe job and an Audi is not ambitious. And it certainly isn't netting you a YC partnership at 25.

Founding yet another tumblr-for-cats and selling ads isn't ambitious either; you can do mundane work at startups just as easily as you can in a big corporation. You can do ambitious work at both of them, too. For kids who don't come from a wealthy family, there's something to be said for building up a minimal safety net early on by doing ambitious things in a relatively stable large firm. It's not the only way, though (obviously).

Ah, but what if it was

three kids, a safe job, two Ferraris, and the ear of Larry Ellison?

or how about

Climb the ladder, eventually transition to politics, and become a Senator on a technical platform?

ruswick's point is that ambition is not the sole province of the startup crowd.

Also, why does everyone buy into the neoliberal bullshit that it's business which changes the world?

Taking an engineering job at Microsoft at 19 y/o makes perfect sense, too.