[m_rpn]

That's probably only true for most coffee bean subscription SaaS startups, but the world is full of pretty normal business, in which pretty standard engineers and other professionals work, that make money in a streamlined and predictable way but who's story doesn't make it to HN unfortunately.

[sevensor]

I wish that were the case. I’ve spent a good chunk of my career in the “Real Engineer” widget making world, and it’s that experience I’m speaking of here. Even in the semiconductor industry, most people just kept their heads down and never connected their work to the customer, never even thought about what kind of device the chips were going into.

[m_rpn]

Maybe it's just that everyone is too fixated on "creating value for customers", might it be that customers don't really want value, but they just want to buy stuff? This might explain this big divergence in our real world experiences. It's either this or that most businesses actually do bring some value and have a degree of understanding of what they're doing, otherwise no customer would be buying anything and unemployment rate would be closer to 99% everywhere.