I like how utterly brazen his job titles are, he was the 'Director of Engineering' of a team of him, and is now the 'Co-founder and Editor' of his own blog.
No one gives a crap about your title apart from HR and your ego.
That or having a good idea that isn't just marketing. No matter what organization your in there is internal marketing and external in terms of what we produce. I say that as sometimes despite what we advertise as ground breaking is just a web form plugged into a dockerfile.
Some of it is deep coding problems, but there's a fair bit of FAANG that's just protobuf/avro engineering and GRPC/thrift/restli midtier apps.
But sometimes there are interesting problems
And the paycheck still comes on time
Depends on your risk tolerance. You will most likely not be able to profit greatly off of your deep coding problems if you do them for a company with highly stratified reporting chains. Profits will get passed around to the idiots above you in the chain of command, leaving you with peanuts; probably some small bonus or raise. In my experience, engineers aren't rewarded greatly at a company unless they fit a certain bill or serve a certain HR/political purpose, unbeknownst to you. Such implicit biases are however, impossible to hide as they can be measured directly.
If upper management doesn't like your attitude, behavior, your looks, your race, your gender, or anything else, they can and will stop giving you opportunities. Sometimes they will treat you poorly so you leave, sometimes they'll keep you around until you do something to get fired. The latter is certainly likely if they treat you poorly. This is not only unethical, but is a normalized practice in HR.
Now, consider the case of solving deep coding problems on your own -- you're not getting paid, but you will most likely reap all of the rewards for any big wins you have, and your life isn't at the whim of internal politics that you are unaware of.
Ask an engineer to build something and they will think of the twenty features which will make a compelling product, and the great ones will work day and night to deliver them. A great startup CEO will identify the three features that get the first customer, then roadmap the remaining features in conjunction with sales, marketing, and hiring.
Great CEOs know how to build teams and solve hard problems, usually from years of experience and failures. It's hardly ever as simple as reading a book or overcoming some mental hurdles.
Seriously, the people who want to make a career in software and the people who want to be entrepreneurs don't need any convincing. What is even the point of this?
It's circular. Where's the value?
The same can be observed in some educationnal subjects, some teachers make money teaching students how to become teachers of the same thing, with no concrete value other than filling jobs. The money often come from state funds :)
There a plenty of folks actually starting a business, and you either didn't click on their blog articles, or they didn't write a blog.
Sure, I have a handful of ideas that seem reasonable and dreams of startup success—and maybe I'll explore them in early retirement.
It's not like there's only two options.
I find this semi-guru semi-brag style of writing so infuriating. I’m sure he’s a great iOS developer but come on man... I wish more people wrote with the goal of genuinely helping others rather than just trying to promote their own brand.
Just because we have power as engineers, doesn't mean everyone is actually willing to go the extra distance to do their own thing etc. And I am as hardcore as you can get when it comes to controlling your own destiny. It comes at a significant cost and to be blunt, not everyone wants to do that. A lot of engineers are happy to have a good paying job that provides work-life balance, great benefits and most importantly: not worrying about the lives of a bunch of people (Read:employees).
I would not work a job, hopefully unless I literally cannot food on the table anymore. But I very well know that a lot of engineers who can be creators are happy to create things for others, work a job that they are satisfied with and call it a day. Nothing wrong with that at all if that's what floats your boat.
I have the skills to create my own product. Without customers, it is not a job. I realize that he corrects his terminology later on in the article, but he does not address that disconnect.
I'm dumbfounded users do this on Medium. And to think I wasted a free story on a feel good, self-congratulatory, 4 minute blog post that says little more than "Just Do It." Amusingly enough, the author's main product is a service to "make more money on Medium," and yet the landing page provides no information about the service, just a huge "Request Access" button.
And the message? Quit some VC funded thing and start a blog?
The world is a strange place... Hedge fund sellouts now have finally found an alternative.
In contrast the company in question has the tagline, "Make more money on Medium". Their existence is predicated on an external indulgence, and those are foundations of sand.
I'm all about creative expression as therapy, but please don't confuse it with a worldview you wish me to subscribe to.
Seriously, take an hour of your time and learn how to use Hugo, buy a cheap domain name, and set up your blog for hosting directly from a CDN. Stop being that person that helps medium make money off of other people's content.
"Editor of Better Programming (medium.com/better-programming). Building Moneyball to help you make more money on Medium (sign up for the beta @ usemoneyball.com)"
Writing whatever people are willing to read in the promise to make it big, without having to do anything big yourself?
As someone that mostly enjoys optimizing distributed systems and debugging them. I can assure you that, I can’t build a product out of this skill set. There’s consulting, but then I have to continually sell myself, which I don’t enjoy. Working for a large company, I have of plenty of these problems to solve and I get paid pretty well.
You might not end up a millionaire but you'll generally be better paid then a lot of people in your age / social bracket.
A lot of people just don't want to make the sacrifices to run their own business!
You’re far better off, on average, this way than if you work for startups. You’re also more likely to become a millionaire this way than starting a company, but your less likely to make hundreds of millions.