[nickfromseattle]

> But if you don’t know how to create products that people want, market it, have funding for it and not get crushed by a larger company that can throw a team at it, you won’t be successful.

Yes, but you can keep trying. In entrepreneurship, you only need to be right once. Most successful entrepreneurs have had failed startups and projects before they got it right.

>The whole idea of if you work really hard you are guaranteed success gives too many people unrealistic hope

It's not guaranteed, but it's the best system to get what you want, that we have.

[scarface_74]

> Yes, but you can keep trying. In entrepreneurship, you only need to be right once

And how many entrepreneurs are “right” enough to make up for the years of lost wages they could make even as ordinary CRUD enterprise devs let alone working for BigTech or adjacent? Not to mention the compounding returns if they had invested the money early?

HN especially suffers from survivorship bias. You don’t hear about all of the failed founders who are in their 30s and 40s with nothing to show for it and unemployable.

The “best” system is to “grind leetCode and work for a FAANG” (tm r/cscareerqyestions). Even the second best system of working your way up through enterprise dev is much more likely to succeed.

[Desafinado]

You're making fair points although I'll just add that I didn't claim that success was easy, I just described the minimum requirements for success. It's always going to be a gamble.